Read the reporter's article here. The current Wikipedia article is here. The vandalism lasted 12 days.

I say Jimbo and the Wikimedia Foundation are responsible for creating an attractive nuisance for children, and after that, Google is responsible for ranking Wikipedia articles in the stratosphere. But just in case the mayor disagrees with me, I've captured the screen shots, and the IP address of the vandal. Now the question is, "Will Wikipedia pull a 'Fuzzy' and toss the evidence down the memory hole?" If they do, I'll post it all on Wikipedia-Watch.

Actually, the mayor might agree with me:

(Moses Lake is where the little ISP is located that the vandal used to edit the article.)

Typical...

And when are they finally going to stop repeating that blatantly-inaccurate "most vandalism is caught and reverted within five minutes" crap? Did they just pull that figure out of their collective asses?

Sure, maybe it gets caught right away if it's just a complete page-blanking, or it just says "ERIC IS FAG," but people have had plenty of time to develop more sophistication with respect to their Wikipedia activities, don't you think?

And if you point out that this is the inevitable result of having a popular website that "anyone can edit," they just wring their hands and whine, "but they just don't understand what Wikipedia is all about! Why can't we make them understand? WAAAAAAAAAH!"

On the WhinyEN-L list today there was another story like this, where similar vandalism that had only lasted two days (oooh, speedy work there, folks!) had been sporked by some Canadian tourism board and actually printed, on paper, in a bunch of brochures they stocked at local hotels.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/ottawa/story/2007...t-brochure.html

So how do you think the whiners reacted when they saw that? Three guesses...


"They" being the company who printed the things, not the people in the community that got hosed, and not the jagoff behind the IP address who - I'm quite sure - just laughed himself silly over the whole thing.