Registered user named "Heretocausetrouble" with no user or talk page adds vandalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=186179853

IP reverts
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=186312549

But the reversion made the article size drop more than half and drop about 10,000 bytes.



Cluebot to the rescue!

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=186312678

Vandalism put back in!

And IP that reverted it warned
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&oldid=62385476



Another IP reverts the vandalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=186312695


But an administrator reverts back to the vandalized version
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=186312812

We could almost merge this with Yehudi's thread on how an article deteriorates.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=15428&hl=

Me thinking that too. On the other hand, this one did have a happy ending, no?

IP vandalizes. Nobody notices until 22 days later when another IP undoes it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=181719702

As an experiment, I vandalized an article last July and hid that nonsense within a genuinely helpful edit, with helpful, disarming edit summary and everything.

It's still there. It's 6 months later.

I seem to recall hearing once that someone changed the flag on a country page (Great Britain, I heard) and no one noticed for months. Truth?

The ability to do this is more disturbing than most people realize. It's easy enough to just revert and move on if it's an article on fish or something. But what happens when (conditional not intended) another person gets on the Internet one morning and finds out they conspired to kill Robert Kennedy? Wikipedia would be defaming people, even after instituting measures that were supposed to make that impossible.

And who knows whether or not someone is running an experiment like this on a BLP? It's possible.

There are quite a few ways you can hide activity - and if you are socking, doing a few changes followed by something nice followed by an IP vandalism will soon bury your edit in history. Reverters rarely look too far back in history, a diff to the version before an IP vandal can look like a quality restoration.

If the admin is not familiar with the topic and is just reverting one of those guys who fails to understand the basics of male and female anatomy, then the attack will have apparently been dealt with.

"On November, 22nd, 1963, John Seigenthaler, Sr. killed and ate then-President John F. Kennedy."

This survived for 31 hours, at a time when Seigenthaler's bio was on a lot of watch lists. See the bottom of this page to find out how it was done.

An admin friend of mine used his account to insert an invented nickname into an article in late 2004. It's still there.

If your edit uses standard English and sounds plausible, there's a good chance no one will ever pick it up. It's even better if you include an inline citation. As long as the article isn't controversial, no one will actually check the source, and it will stand immobile because editors think there's something very wrong about removing sourced statements.

The cleverest way to do it is to use the SlimVirgin technique -move a load of text around all over the place whilst making small but crucial changes - it is then very difficult to see what has been changed because a diff just shows a load of red text.

Contrary to popular conception, ninja were typically indoctrinated to sudden outbursts of blatant violence, usually resulting in the deaths of others beyond just the person they were hired to kill. This method of operation was supplanted in the public view of ninja as stealthy warriors of the night, mainly due to western storytellers adapting the "oriental shadow warrior" to fit the European archetype of assassins being remorseless, silent killers.

{{tl;dr|Ninjas are totally sweet, they flip out and kill people for no reason!}}