I’ve done it once. It was not exactly subtle, but it was very minor, and I thought it was funny at the time. It was to do with (cue every doper falling asleep) inter-factional politics in the Australian railway heritage and restoration movement, and I vandalised the page of the Bad Guys™.
The most subtle one I know of has an unpopular member of parliament listed as coming from a rural seat and therefore being a “country member” (cunt, remember). It’s not technically vandalism, and it’s been there for months now.
I’ve done it on several occasions, usually to prove a point. When the dumbass students I go to school with quote Wikipedia like gospel, I go to that article and put in that “their name is a moronic asshole.”
Not really, but someone apparently thought so. I am a botanic by profession, and I edited the entry for Chenopodium vulvaria, or Foulsmelling Goosefoot to specify that the leaves, if crushed, had the odor of unwashed female genitalia. I’m sorry, but it just does. I remember standing on that wayside in Foggia, Italy, crushing the leaves under my nose and smelling its smell, and there is no other way both as apt and colorful to describe that particular odor. Linneaus must have thougth the same thing, because that’s where the Latin name (“vulvaria”) comes from, too.
Someone with an undoubtedly “purer” mind then mine “corrected” it within a day. :rolleyes:
I not only have never done so, but I am thoroughly pissed off at the proprietors of Wikipedia. I had in fact, on my former ISP, done a few accurate edits. After I changed ISP, I used Wikipedia as normal, and when I found an error, went to edit it. And I found out that the IP address that Juno assigned to my computer was banned from editing Wikipedia for vandalism. That’s right, they banned a dynamic IP address.
OKay, there’s a process for appealing such a ban, so I undertake to use it. It amounts to sending e-mail to an administrator whose username is some long complex phrase about clowns. So I produce the e-mail text per instructions, check to make sure I’ve got the recipient address correct, and send it.
It’s refused. No mail being accepted at that address.
I come off banning in January. I’ll probably continue to use Wikipedia for information, as it’s easy to access and covers an enormous range of subjects.
But I have no use for how the board is run, and I sincerely hope that the Insane Clown Posse catches the idiot masquerading as an Admin. there who is afraid of them, and does appropriate things to him.
The Wikibird is as generous as it is vengeful. The Wikibird shall leave a brand shiny new car under your pillow at night (this is, as you can imagine, hard on the bed springs, as well as the bed frame, and possibly the floor beneath the bed itself). At that point, you’ll be ditched with any remaining payments on the brand shiny new car as the Wikibird flies in through your window to poop on the car on a daily basis.
Check out MEBuckner’s link above. The problem isn’t with the ‘purity’ of the addition, it’s with the verifiability. If Linnaeus actually did name the flower after the female pudenda, I’m sure there’s some sort of documentation on that, beyond your memories of hiking through the countryside.
Wikipedia editors just aren’t as patient as Dopers are: they deal with so much original research that they revert rather than request a cite. Go put your factoid back in the article, and add a soure for it. I’m sure it won’t be reverted.
After you tag a few warnigns on the talk page, take it to Administrator intervention against vandalism. It takes a couple minutes to report but generally they’re pretty good about blocking vandals.
In addition, if a particular page is being targeted, you can request page protection which will block IP vandals from making edits to that page.
Maybe its just me, but I find advice like that terribly hard to find on Wikipedia. Last time I sought protection for a page I hunted down the editor of a page that was protected to ask, other than that Wikipedia help on the subject seemed hard to find.
In the aftermath of the Siegenthaler controversy, I decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea to vandalize Wikipedia for any reason. I have not, nor will I ever vandalize Wikipedia.
I have gotten into edit wars, however. I usually give up at some point because it’s simply not worth the hassle. If people have a desperate need to perpetuate incorrect information, that’s not my responsibility. It only becomes my responsibility when the morons tell me that it’s correct and I have to argue them down.
I corrected one the other day that I randomly came across. It was a list of fictional wolves, or mythological horses, or something similar. At the end of the list was the entry:
*Pussyjuice cuntlicker
Which I just removed. I’d never edited Wiki before and didn’t realize there was more to the process. Will they just put it back in? I can’t remember which article I was reading at the time.
One that made me giggle, for no good reason, was in the “breast” article. Some vandal took the photo caption “the breasts of a pregnant woman,” and replaced breasts with luscious mangoes. It was just so deadpan and unexpected.
Usually random acts of vandalism are there just to see how long they will be around before they’re corrected. The ones who restore bad information (or badly written, or uncited) are those who actually believe the stuff they’re adding is worthy of the article.
No… I include Wikipedia vandals in the same category as people who post negative Yelp reviews about a place because they had a bad blind date there some night three years ago. Grow up.
There really shouldn’t be any intersection between the sets People who vandalise Wikipedia and members of a message board dedicated to fighting ignorance, should there? Sorry if that sounds preachy (and I guess that’s what it is), but I find the whole idea really depressing.
