By Duncan Hooper
Last Updated: 8:31am BST 05/10/2007
Six bureaucrats from Japan's Agriculture Ministry have been reprimanded for spending their work time writing Wikipedia entries on subjects ranging from films to cartoon robots.
One of the employees focused solely on a page about Gundam, a popular, long-running animated series about giant robots, spending hours submitting 260 entries.
The series has spun off intricate toy robots popular among schoolchildren as well as adults known as "otaku" nerds.
"The Agriculture Ministry is not in charge of Gundam," noted Tsutomu Shimomura an official at the ministry who announced the results of an internal probe.
The six civil servants together made 408 entries from ministry computers since 2003.
The ministry has reacted by banning access to Wikipedia at work.
An Imperial Household Agency official was reprimanded last month for using an agency computer to delete references on Wikipedia that criticized imperial tombs.
The online encyclopaedia recently revealed plans to trial restrictions on contributors following evidence of misleading postings.
Only committed editors who have submitted at least 30 reliable entries in a month would be permitted to make instant changes to the site.
Telegraph
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