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The U-T Watchdog story on the removal of certain misconduct references from the San Diego Police Department's Wikipedia page has sparked a lot of discussion.

After we published the story on Tuesday, it made its way to the front page of the social sharing website Reddit.

Readers on our website and on Reddit posted hundreds of comments, many of them insightful and probing.

While the police department has said that it never directed employees to edit its Wikipedia page, U-T Watchdog confirmed that Internet addresses registered to the department were used to make anonymous changes. And a police dispatcher confirmed for us that he'd deleted some of the police misconduct summaries with his own Wikipedia username. He said the edits were for accuracy, and because it was unfair to brand the whole department with the actions of a few.

Below, we've curated certain provocative and interesting commentary from Reddit, with some profanity deleted. You can read the full, unedited conversation here.

justaasking: They may think it's within their right to edit. It's against Wikipedia's etiquette to provide first-hand information (let's imagine they consider their edits to be more truthful, which is probably a stretch) but they may not want to obey that etiquette.

CitizenPremier: It is within their rights, legally.

theth1rdchild: Somehow I don't think it should be legal for them to walk into a library and rip out pages of a book on how bad they are. But that's just me.

CitizenPremier: It really isn't the same. Wikipedia's policies allow anyone to edit til they get banned. If they were banned and were working to circumvent a ban, that might be different.

theth1rdchild: If anything, what they're doing here is morally worse. Wikipedia is community run, and an attempt at keeping the facts straight as opposed to decided upon by a publisher. They're not silencing an author or publisher, they're attempting to silence the community as a whole. I know there's no legal or even wiki-policy related wording stopping them, I'm just saying there should be.

Here is the original post:
Readers react to SDPD Wikipedia edits