I wanted to find out some more about soul food, and I discovered something unpleasant in this Wikipedia article.
When I try to remove the offensive line, it doesn’t show up in the editing window. Why is that?
What, exactly, is the offending line? I don’t see anything particularly unpleasant there.
It was just deleted, as if by magic.
Although I did not get to savor the satisfaction of doing it myself, I’m pleased nonetheless.
Not to pry Monstro, but do you often find yourself readings things that aren’t there when you look again?
Perhaps it was deleted just after you first opened the page, but before you went to edit it. That would explain why it was there when you read it, but didn’t appear in the editing box. Someone’s just faster than you, is all. Take a look at the editing history.
Happened to me once with a vandalized entry I found. Thought I’d be nice and see if I could unvandalize it, got into the editing mode, couldn’t find any evidence of the naughtiness, popped back out of the editing mode and the nastiness was gone. I managed to figure out the editing history enough that I could see that someone else just reacted faster than I did.
Someone was indeed faster than I was (I find it amazing that someone in the universe was curious about soul food at the exact moment I was). I swear refreshing the article did not show a change in the vandalistic comment. Maybe there was so kind of server delay or something.
Yeah. Your face!
Was the offending line the somewhat surreal one rambling on about fat mothers making food? According to the edit history, that line was only around for four minutes before the genius who wrote it decided to remove it. And then someone else decided that he didn’t want to let the vandal have all the fun, so he reverted both of the vandal’s edits, achieving nothing. Then someone else reverted the first pseudo-reverter’s reversion. Good times were had by all.
Don’t see what was so bad about that line, though. To me, it seems like a perfectly accurate, reasonable, and intelligible sentence that belongs in that article and was written by someone with more than three brain cells.
But yeah, I have had things like that happen in the past. I’d find some vandalism in the article, go to edit it but find that it’s gone, but then find it’s still there when I go back to the article, even after refreshing. I put it down to some intermediate server caching stuff that it shouldn’t. In fact, in my experience, an imperial shitload of computer problems are caused by things being cached when they shouldn’t be.
What was the offensive line, monstro?
Heck, I remember one page where someone had replaced a large swath of the text with a completely irrelevant excerpt from Elton John’s page. I and others tried to revert it and were getting automated warnings (and reverts of our reverts) by a bot that thought we were vandals.
Assuming I’m looking at the right piece of vandalism, you can see it in context here, right under Origins.
Whenever I discover a vandalism on Wikipedia, it is almost always gone after a refresh—within a couple of minutes at most. There are dedicated editors who just sit and watch lists of recently changed articles and pounce on any vandalism. I come across vandalism rather frequently, but the speed at which it is removed confirms my trust in Wiki.
Please tell me you’re joking.
Waitaminute here! You’re saying this:
is just fine, nothing hateful or bigotted about it? :dubious: Ooookaaay then! :rolleyes: Please tell me you’ve whooshed more than one person here!
:o Well, looks like I have.
Come on people! Even ignoring the blatant bigotry, how could anyone seriously call that sentence accurate, reasonable, or intelligible? Well granted, there are people who think that, but such people wouldn’t be able to use such a complicated word as ‘intelligible’.
To be fair, the origins page has now lost the n word.