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The Hillsborough inaccuracies were especially incendiary, with an inquest into the deaths currently under way. Senior civil servants launched an investigation into the reports.

“The amendments made to Wikipedia are sickening,” read a statement from the U.K. cabinet office. “The behaviour is in complete contravention of the Civil Service Code. It is entirely unacceptable.”

But with hundreds of thousands of people on the government’s network, officials feared that identifying who was involved “may prove challenging.”

Wikipedia catalogues the IP addresses of anyone who revises a page in its online encyclopedia, and a history of all edits are available online. Also publicly available are the IP addresses attached any user on the Government Secure Intranet — making it possible to link the Wikipedia changes back to government computers.

Users with a government-linked IP-address have been repeatedly warned by Wikipedia’s administrators not to vandalize the site’s articles. A notice on the personalized page seen by users of the Government network says: “This IP address has been repeatedly blocked from editing Wikipedia in response to abuse of editing privileges.”

The volunteer editor responsible for making disparaging remarks about Mr. Gilmour was traced to an IP address that is often used to mask the specific addresses of government computers — a practice that’s in accordance “with standard good information security practice and to help defend against electronic attack,” government records show.