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thekohser
Remember when we talked about a vandalism contest, where we'd honor the most outrageous vandalistic entries that lasted the longest time on Wikipedia? I have a nominee, spotted while I happened to be glancing at the Recent Changes page.

Check out this little-known history of Elsa, Texas.
QUOTE
Anglo-Americans didn't settle the area until the 1900s. When they settled, they put the Mexicanos in labor camps and had them pick over 50,000 papayas per day.During the early 1900s, land speculators began to buy the papaya fields...
Elsa Tx. was soon the a setting for revolution. The Anglo's began to desperately search for the mexican messiah that the good hispanics from Elsa believed in. Legend goes that they killed every newborn daughter and son in search of the savior, but one day a baby turned into a giant Yellow Jacket and killed the Anglos.


The wonderful thing about this legend of the Mexican messiah is that it originated on June 25, 2007, and has since been overlooked by about 2 or 3 well-intentioned editors, and God knows how many readers. Indeed, one editor even restored the hoax while trying to repair something even more preposterous in the article!

Not only that, but the legend continued on October 15th:

QUOTE
Then the Yellow Jacket turned out to be a homosexual. So the mexicans killed it and in return turned to a bunch of mindless idiots who mostly began to work in politics.


But, alas, some goody-two-shoes editor named Knight of the Lepus (I'm not kidding) seems to have picked up on the "crazy talk", as he calls it in his edit summary.

Oh, well. It was funny while it lasted (nearly four months).

Remember, everyone, Jimbo told us -- "Vandalism is a minor issue. Most vandalism is corrected within moments."

Moments. Months. Same diff.

Greg
everyking
While such sad cases as this do exist (U.S. small town articles seem particularly vulnerable), it doesn't invalidate the claim that most vandalism is reverted within moments. That's still true despite occasional exceptions.
jorge
QUOTE(everyking @ Wed 17th October 2007, 4:23pm) *

While such sad cases as this do exist (U.S. small town articles seem particularly vulnerable), it doesn't invalidate the claim that most vandalism is reverted within moments. That's still true despite occasional exceptions.

I know some vandalism that's been on prominent articles for ages. If the vandalism looks convincing it will likely survive as hardly anyone removes edits just for being unsourced (this is basically the most fundemental flaw in Wikipedia).
thekohser
QUOTE(everyking @ Wed 17th October 2007, 11:23am) *

While such sad cases as this do exist (U.S. small town articles seem particularly vulnerable), it doesn't invalidate the claim that most vandalism is reverted within moments. That's still true despite occasional exceptions.

You can't say that for sure, until you've checked all pages for vandalism and determined how many vandalistic edits are in place, and for how long.

Still, half of my point was that Jimbo says it's "a minor issue". Seems to be that in a responsible encyclopedia, any vandalism that gets rebroadcast to even one more reader is not "a minor issue".

Indeed, we have seen that it's the stuff of lawsuits. "Issues" that result in lawsuits typically aren't "minor" in my book.

Greg
Jonny Cache
Greg, I gather that you've never spent much time in Texas …

Jonny cool.gif
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