Politicians' Wiki entries altered

It comes a year after the Herald revealed that staff working for the Howard and Iemma governments were removing embarrassing details from the popular online encyclopedia.

The actions, a contravention of the website's conflict of interest guidelines, have outraged Wikipedia volunteers, who say they frequently catch politicians trying to censor entries.

They fear that countless more edits by politicians have gone unnoticed because it is difficult to trace them if the changes are made from a home computer or from a registered Wikipedia user account.

The editing instructions, emailed by the parliamentary librarian, Roxanne Missingham, on Monday, told MPs and their staff how to remove information they regarded as "incorrect or biased".

Since Monday, computers in the Department of Parliamentary Services, which houses the Parliamentary Library, have been used to make more than 30 edits to Wikipedia pages. The edits came from the same internet address as hundreds of others made over the past few years.

On Monday, the page for the Labor MP, Kerry Rea, was modified to remove a paragraph detailing criticism of Ms Rea's full-time work as a councillor while she was spending considerable time campaigning for Parliament.

On Tuesday the page for the Innovation Minister, Kim Carr, was changed to remove slabs of personal details and a paragraph saying he had been criticised for branch-stacking. Hours later, a reference to the "disastrous" 2002 state election in Victoria was cut from the page of the Liberal senator Helen Kroger.

In May the page for the former affairs foreign minister Alexander Downer was modified by someone using the same computer to exclude references to criticisms of his privileged family background.

The Labor Whip, Roger Price, told the Herald he had not edited his page but believed it was fair for politicians "to be able to factually correct their entries", as some details were "quite malicious".

A spokesman for the Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, said: "It is reasonable for MPs to make factual corrections."

A Wikipedia administrator, Sarah Ewart, said: "One of Wikipedia's cornerstone principles is the neutral point of view. Most politically motivated edits simply aren't neutral."

She said she would not frown on politicians and their staff editing malicious entries but she discouraged them from editing content. She said a better approach would be to contact Wikipedia administrators and make any corrections that way.

Ms Missingham said she had not made any of the changes.

She said the Parliamentary Library was justified in advis-ing MPs how to edit the site because part of its role was to help them "use new technologies effectively".

■ Asher Moses, a reporter on smh.com.au, the Herald 's website, has won the online section of the Young Australian Journalist of the Year Award.

He received the award for a story in August about staff from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet changing entries on the user-generated online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, that might have been damaging to John Howard's government.