The Liverpool Echo say that some abusive alterations to the Hillsborough Wiki page came from computers inside Whitehall.
While Wikipedia is a brilliant resource, its openness leaves it susceptible to two big flaws; misinformation and abuse. And a story today in the Liverpool Echo highlights a shocking case of the latter.
They report that the Wiki page on the Hillsborough disaster has been tampered with on numerous occasions using computers that are based inside the British Government’s offices in London.
It began in 2009 when ‘Blame Liverpool fans’ was added and three years later “You’ll never walk alone” was changed to “You’ll never walk again”.
The changes continued, with a reference to ‘This is Anfield’ changed to ‘This is a S***hole’ while the line ‘nothing for the victims of the Heysel stadium disaster’ were added to the section on the Hillsborough memorial at Anfield.
The IP addresses used to make the changes were tracked to British government departments including the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Her Majesty’s Treasury and the Office of the Solicitor General.
As we saw recently with the Munich graffiti on the Liam Whelan Bridge in Dublin, there are idiots everywhere who love to try and upset people for kicks, but the fact that these Wiki changes came from inside the British government must be particularly galling to the families of the victims of the Hillsborough disaster, who have battled the authorities for years to try and get the truth about events that day.
The British government’s Cabinet Office have started an investigation and they released a statement to the paper.
“We thank the Liverpool ECHO for bringing this to our attention. This is a matter that we will treat with the utmost seriousness and are making urgent inquiries.
“No one should be in any doubt of the government’s position regarding the Hillsborough disaster and its support for the families of the 96 victims and all those affected by the tragedy.”
