Are robots ruining the Japanese economy?

Tue, 10/09/2007 - 11:06am

After an internal investigation, six Japanese civil servants at Japan's Agriculture Ministry were accused of neglecting their work and spending countless hours editing Wikipedia pages. It might have been acceptable if they were toiling away on articles for say, beef exports or rice cultivation, but the six bureaucrats were busy tweaking entries about the ever-popular manga comics. Their favorite page was the one devoted to Gundam, a popular animated series on robots. One of the six had apparently made 260 changes to the Gundam site since 2003. Tsutomu Shimomura, a spokesman for the ministry, made it extremely clear that this was NOT in their job description:

The agriculture ministry is not in charge of robots.

And to discourage others from following suit, the six received a harsh, verbal reprimand. That'll keep 'em in line.

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