Last updated at 17:15 31 August 2007

A Dutch royal couple have acknowledged altering a Wikipedia entry about a scandal four years ago that forced the prince to renounce his claim to the throne.

A spokesman for the Royal Information Service admitted that Prince Johan Friso, son of the reigning Queen Beatrix, and Princess Mabel of Oranje-Nassau had changed wording on the "people's encyclopaedia" to make it more favourable.

The pair are the latest to be embarrassed by a spate of discoveries by journalists and bloggers of "vanity" changes to Wikipedia entries.

Scroll down for more...

The original scandal broke in 2003 when Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende announced his government's refusal to support the princess - then known as Mabel Wisse Smit - becoming a member of the Royal House because she had given "incomplete and incorrect information" to him about her past, "resulting in a breach of confidence."

Wisse Smit had denied to Balkenende having a romantic liaison with druglord Klaas Bruinsma while she was in college in 1989.

Bruinsma was killed in a gangland hit in 1991. She later conceded knowing him and knowing he was a drug dealer, but denied any sexual relationship.

By withholding government approval of Friso's marriage, the prince had to choose between Wisse Smit and his place as second in line to inherit the throne. They married in 2004.

On January 8 last year, someone using a computer at Huis ten Bosch, the royal palace in The Hague, altered the Wikipedia entry on Wisse Smit that said she "gave misleading and false information" to Balkenende, removing the words "and false."

Scroll down for more...

Wikipedia records the exact time and IP address - the numerical identifier of each computer on the Internet - when any user alters a page. The IP address used for the January 8 alteration is assigned to Huis ten Bosch.

After the story circulated in the Dutch media, Friso and Mabel quickly acknowledged they were the revisionists.

"They both made the changes together in order to make the entry match the letter which they sent to the prime minister (explaining why they misled him) in 2003," spokesman Chris Breedveld said.

The couple feel that due to repeated mistakes in the media, an "incorrect version of events has arisen," he said.

Similar incidents of people or institutions amending Wikipedia entries have been popping up around the globe in the past month after a US graduate student developed a tool dubbed the "Wikiscanner" to more easily track the source.

Wikipedia records also show someone within the palace made unobjectionable amendments to the entry on Friso in December 2005, correcting details about his university studies.

On the Net:

http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess-Mabel-of-Orange-Nassau