Comments:Dutch Justice Department bans Wikipedia for employees following vandalism

Latest comment: 17 years ago by 70.15.116.59

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All of the edits seem to have been juvenile, rather than political. The first is harmless.

Yeah, I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, Wikipedia vandals are huge assholes and should be thwarted whenever possible. On the other, the vandalism was fixed easily and it seems against the spirit of Wikipedia for 30,000 people to loose access to it because of a few stupid vandals. Spacehusky 04:21, 18 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

This is a wasteful and despicable act of vandalism by people who obviously are paid for doing nothing but wasting taxpayer money in the Netherlands. The may think it is all a cute prank but to the readers who look to reliable sources for news and information this is a punishable offence and should be treated by the Dutch Ministry of Justice as such.

Jan Smallenbroek


Name me an organisation with 30,000 employees, none of whom have at some point in time added some juvenile humour to Wikipedia, on articles that are either about a well known subject such as Jesus Christ, or a well known public figure such as Lousewies van der Laan. Personally I think I'd struggle to find such an organisation with 30 employees... --Random 17:46, 18 November 2007 (UTC)Reply

I think it's a shame that human nature is like that. Of course if they just block URLs matching *.wikipedia.org/w/* then people could not edit, but still view. --Brian McNeil / talk 19:46, 18 November 2007 (UTC)Reply
The Random User has the truth of it - the problem is that as long as it provides cheap media thrills to "out" a high-profile company or bureau's vandalism, stories like this can happen again. The final outcome will be either a) many companies blocking Wikipedia editing or b) many companies cracking down much harder on irrelevant Internet stupidity, and neither is really a good thing. Although it would have some detrimental effects, perhaps Wikipedia should borrow a trick from the Ministry of Justice and erase IP address information a certain interval after posting, just as the Ministry erased their internal records by law, or alternatively find a way to not display IP addresses in the first place. 70.15.116.59 05:32, 19 November 2007 (UTC)Reply