Tom Waterhouse Wikipedia Page Sanitised Tom Waterhouse leaves the More Joyous inquiry on Monday. There is no mention of it on his Wikipedia page. He claimed vindication in Monday's Racing NSW inquiry, but staff for Tom Waterhouse have sometimes preferred to give the truth a nudge, rather than presume it will prevail on its own steam. Mr Waterhouse's employees have been sanitising the bookmaker's Wikipedia page, removing references to parliamentary inquiries into the march of sports betting into lounge rooms and even his turn on the Dancing With the Stars program. While I'm not actually across the page, I know that staff do make changes if there is something defamatory, illegal or not true on there. Perhaps the most glaring omission, however, is that the More Joyous racing inquiry does not rate a mention on the page. There is also a warning at the top of the entry. "A major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject," a disclaimer reads. It may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia's content policies, particularly neutral point of view. Mr Waterhouse said that he has never directly ordered his staff to remove or edit any content from the page. "I've only asked them to make sure [the content] abides by what is legal," he said. Of course, in those situations, they have to take that [material] down. He said there was no specific piece of information on the page that he had seen and asked staff to edit or remove and that they did this of their own accord. Anyone can use Wikipedia and start editing pages of the site. Other users can discuss, dispute or reverse those edits. And Wikipedians have long held suspicious about the Waterhouse page. "Sounds like it was taken straight from an advertising brochure," wrote user SpencerCollins last September. He may have been tipped off by the inclusion of such detail as the fact that Mr Waterhouse was a high school prefect and the following, included under the heading "branding." Waterhouse invested considerably in marketing and advertising, adopting a distinct style guide comprising of black and white imagery with splashes of aquamarine. Those edits were made by the user GChinaP. "He [Waterhouse] asked me to write up something for Wikipedia," Gilbert Chinapen, who works on TomWaterhouse.com, confirmed to Fairfax. Another user, Angustommiepragnell, made dozens of edits to the page, removing material that was claimed to be defamatory or incorrect, but in fact had been widely reported. The user removed references to Mr Waterhouse's refusal to appear before a parliamentary inquiry into gambling in sport. The phrasing was later changed to "declined an invitation." Also left out is that Mr Waterhouse was benched by Channel Nine's NRL commentary team in March, following a public backlash against gambling being incorporated into live sport. Angus Pragnell, the marketing campaign manager for TomWaterhouse.com, declined to comment. References to Waterhouse's father, who did six months' periodic detention after being found guilty of false swearing, were also edited by a user called Suzanne888. The ongoing omissions and changes prompted one frustrated editor to write: "Waterhouse staff such as Angus Pragnell and Gilbert Chinapen shouldn't be editing/'sanitising' this entry!" Later edits to the page included the removal of references to Mr Waterhouse's highly enthusiastic but ultimately unsuccessful routines on Dancing With the Stars. He was eliminated in the second round of the show's 2006 season. It's not the first time changes to Wikipedia pages have been linked back to their subjects. In February Fairfax reported that Occupy Melbourne's official Wikipedia page was edited twice by a person using a City of Melbourne computer to remove contentious words in the lead-up to the re-election of lord mayor Robert Doyle last year. In August 2007 when John Howard was prime minister, Fairfax reported that staff in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet were caught editing Wikipedia to remove details that might be damaging to the government. ABC TV's Media Watch then reported that staff at several media organisations, including Fairfax Media, were found editing their own and others' Wikipedia pages, with some edits heaping abuse on rivals. with Ben Grubb