Your Tax Dollars at Wiki-Work

The Sacramento Bee has this entertaining expose about what many of your tax dollars are buying in Sacramento -- namely, countless edits to Wikipedia.

The Bee reports that state Department of Justice "computers were used to alter Wikipedia entries about submarines, battleships and vintage airplanes roughly 1,100 times." The Bee calculates that "If the anonymous aviation buff spent 10 minutes on average per edit, that's more than four 40-hour weeks over three years." Another state worker "edited encyclopedia entries about pornography stars," complete with "profane accounts of their sexual skills."

Then, of course, there are the political aides who have tried to make their bosses' entries look better on the online encyclopedia:

Someone from the state Legislature thought it was a good idea to remove a reference to state Sen. Leland Yee's 1992 booking in Hawaii on suspicion of shoplifting.

Another of the Legislature's computer users prettied up a section on Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, citing his penchant for creating budgets that are "lean but not mean" and deleting a summary of his conflicts with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I'm not sure if this does more to diminish my confidence in Wikipedia or in California state government -- although both are pretty low.