WCNC investigates employee time online

CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- What do the popular 60s rock band Herman's Hermits, former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards and Tulsa, Okla., all have in common?

They're all topics found on Wikipedia.com -- topics that were added by Charlotte city workers during normal business hours. Some simply added punctuation or corrected a misspelled word. Others added trivia about celebrities or movies. Then someone spent more than two hours on the Herman's Hermits entry.

Altogether WCNC found city employees made more than 200 contributions to Wikipedia during a one year period. All of the edits, including one made calling John Edwards a liberal [expletive], were traced to computer addresses maintained by the city.

Charlotte Assistant City Manager Julie Burch says their records only go back a year, so the city has no way of determining who made the entries, whether or not they were on duty, or from which department they were made. But she did say the John Edwards comment violates the city's policy that city equipment can't be used for any political purpose.

"Anyone can go out and put anything they want on a Wikipedia page. They can go in and edit what they want. So when you go to a Wikipedia page there is nothing that says it's correct information you're getting," explained Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools spokesperson Susan Johnson.

Johnson says the district changed its filter two years ago to prevent students or teachers from using Wikipedia. 

"We were able to detect it and if you look at the dates you sent us, looking at the time, there weren't a lot of instances after 2006," she said. 

Before the change, we found over 800 edits made on CMS computers. One edit replaced a picture of Adolph Hitler with Barney the dinosaur and someone changed Myers Park High School to Potheads High School.

"There's some really ugly stuff on the Wikipedia," Johnson said. 

It may be a problem other employers share. During a two year period we found 141 edits made on computers at Duke Energy, 605 edits at Bank of America, and 235 at Wachovia. 

Johnson said, "For every block that is put in place, there is somebody finding a way around it."

The city of Charlotte says it does not conduct constant, blanket monitoring of employees and has written guidelines regarding when and how monitoring of a specific employee should occur. 

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