Dunedin councillor Lee Vandervis edits own Wikipedia page to 'repair misinformation'

Lee Vandervis has been called out for editing his own Wikipedia page. Photo / ODT

A prominent member of the Dunedin City Council has been called out for editing his own Wikipedia page.

The page of Lee Vandervis was edited at 10am on Tuesday by a user called "Leevandervis".

The changes were quickly pulled up by a Wikipedia editor who reversed the edits 34 minutes after they were made and flagged the user as having a possible conflict of interest.

Wikipedia's guidelines state that users with a conflict of interest should declare them and propose changes on the article's talk page rather than editing directly, unless the article contains defamation or a serious error that needs to be corrected quickly.

The changes ranged from edits of biographical details to complete rewrites of some of the more recent controversies in which Vandervis has found himself embroiled.

Vandervis initially declined to address the editing directly, saying he was "in a position of trying to repair a whole lot of misinformation" which he had only recently been made aware was on Wikipedia.

He later forwarded an email he sent to Wikipedia, saying that he was openly trying to correct erroneous claims about himself on the site and he believed he was in-line with its editorial policy.

Unlike many users of the site, he did not use a pseudonym, Vandervis said.

Biographical changes included an edit to Vandervis' date of birth, from 1957 to 1955.

A line about Vandervis being teased at school for having a Dutch name was removed and a mention of his love of Pink Floyd was added.

A reference to an incident in the 2010 election campaign, when a volunteer for Vandervis installed an election hoarding which pierced a power cable and caused an outage to 747 consumers, was cut.

Extensive changes were made around some of Vandervis' more recent escapades.

In a section about 11 complaints of inappropriate behaviour, which were attributed to Vandervis in August 2019, references to members of the public as targets of the behaviour were removed.

A line about then chief executive of the council Dr Sue Bidrose having collated the allegations was added, along with two sentences detailing Vandervis' criticisms of Bidrose.

Another line referencing Bidrose was added, this time in relation to a 12th complaint regarding Vandervis' conduct over a parking dispute.

The sentence, "leaks from the DCC to social and local print media falsely recast Vandervis' complaint of a staff member as an attempt by Vandervis to get off a $12 parking ticket", was added.