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Racist changes to articles on Wikipedia glorying in killing or enslaving black people have been linked to a government IP address.
The Cabinet Office was already in hot water after the Wikipedia page on the Hillsborough disaster page was amended to include the words “blame Liverpool fans” were traced to the government’s secure intranet (GSI).
But further analysis showed the government IP address has been used to make a host of insulting changes to the open-source online encyclopaedia.
The entry on Howick Falls in South Africa was amended to say: “According to the legends of the native ‘black peoples’ of this area the fall was discovered in around 2,000BCE. Naturally such hearsay and myth is totally irrelevant to ‘civilised’ society, so we killed or enslaved them all.”
And the address was used to describe Manchester as “the wankers capital of the North.”
Both changes, made in 2006, were quickly spotted by the site’s editors and reversed.
In 2011, one GSI user described the Glasgow suburb of Barlanark as being a place “where the men are men, and so are half the women” on the area’s Wikipedia entry.
Around the same time, the Wikipedia page for Clydebank was also vandalised by a GSI user, with the words: “It is known locally as a total shithole.”
A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said: “We announced an investigation to examine edits to Wikipedia, and will look at all concerns raised.”