I suppose it was too good to last. This morning Guido Fawkes reports on Defra’s wiki experiment (two weeks behind the times…) – and his acolytes decide to wreck the place. All very amusing, I’m sure. Have your Friday frolic, guys, then maybe we can continue trying to achieve something constructive.
This was always going to happen. I spoke to the guys at Defra as it was being launched, and they knew the risk they were taking on. But it’s exactly why wikis have a rollback function. If anybody dares turn this into a ‘government website gets hacked’ story… grr.
Responses
You’ve beaten me to it again! I’ve been out of the office most of the day and haven’t had time to post a blog I started this morning on this very subject. I always think of Guido as Iain Dale’s twisted cousin, at least Iain has an agenda, Guido just appears negative and destructive.
Guido’s gang seem to forget that being a wiki, the content they helpfully amended had probably been written by non-Defra people who wanted to contribute to a debate.
By trying to attack Miliband and/or Defra, all they’ve achieved is an attack on the people who want to influence Government policy on the environment.
Effectively, they’ve tried to censor a forum for the discussion of a subject that affects us all. I don’t think they’ll have an impact on Defra’s approach to the wiki, but you can be sure that there will be some people who’ll’ve seen the wiki and been deterred by Guido’s fan’s comments. Not exactly a success for democracy, is it?
What I’d like to know is precisely how much of my income tax was pissed up against the wall in inventing and implementing this idea? However much it was, I want it removed from my tax bill next year and deducted instead from New Labours funds. I don’t see why I should have to pay one penny towards a project that even the dimmest IT wonk would have known was doomed from the start.
As I said in my piece a couple of weeks ago David, the cost of the wiki hosting was probably around £500. There are 29.5 million income tax payers, according to HMRC’s website. If you want your share of the £500 refunded, that’ll come to roughly 0.0017p. 🙂
Oh, and besides… whatever it was going to cost, it will now cost even more, as someone has to clean up the mess.
What doesn’t seem to be being grasped here, is that a *completely* open wiki for a government agency was absolutely 100% guaranteed to be sabotaged, regardless of who was doing the sabotaging (and you have to admit, it was hilarious in parts)
It shows an utter naivety and lack of foresight to suggest anything else could possibly happen.
While £500 may be a hosting cost, that has no relation to the overall cost. It would be interesting to hear what it was.