Guess which airline has been reported as having attempted to "sanitise" a Wikipedia article about it...
Last week in this space we asked, "Who's Been Fiddling with Wikipedia?" Okay, there was Wal-Mart, the CIA and the Mormon Church. but they're not the only offenders.
This week it emerged that an Air New Zealand computer was used to sanitise an online Wikipedia article to make the airline look less culpable for its part in New Zealand's worst peacetime diaster.
An article about the 1979 Erebus crash on Wikipedia was altered to state "pilots are divided to this day as to whether the responsibility ... should rest with the pilot or the flight planning department" over the deaths of 257 passengers and crew.
The alteration, which has since been deleted, was identified this month as coming from a computer using the Air New Zealand server.
The Press of New Zealand reported that an Air New Zealand spokeswoman said the company was investigating the allegation.
But Cabinet minister Jim Anderton said that, if true, the change was "outrageous (and) entirely erroneous".
It was a case of the airline – now 80 per cent owned by the Government – trying to rewrite history to make it look better.
The airline's computers were implicated through a programme devised by self-described American "destructive technologist" Virgil Griffith to identify the computer systems used by those who made alterations to Wikipedia.
The Wikipedia alteration left unchanged the findings by Justice Peter Mahon's Royal Commission that Air New Zealand executives had been behind an "orchestrated litany of lies" to cover up the cause of the accident, including disposing evidence and engaging in subterfuge.
It also made no change to the assertion that Mahon's findings remained, even though the Privy Council overturned the result because he had exceeded his powers and denied the airline a fair hearing.
Anderton said the alteration suggested that Air New Zealand remained sensitive to allegations of blame for the Erebus crash.
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