Zodiac Killer- Weird Wiki Entry

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I looked at Wiki about the Zodiac Killer. Link.

What surprises me are the opening few lines viz:

His identity was solved by an unknown Australia citizen, his name Dennis Rader.aka btk. The Zodiac killer coined his name in a series of taunting letters he sent to the press.

and then:
The person who discovered who the zodiac killer was an unknown Australian citezen. he did this by looking at several American serial killers and determend through self profling that zodiac and btk were the same people. (sic)
I thought Zodiac was never identified?

2

You just happened to look at the page shortly after it was vandalised.

3

Thanks Colophon. How do you find that?

4

Click the history tab above the article. It will give you the time, date, and name/IP of every edit ever made to the article. If something doesn’t make sense, chances are the vandalism happened within the last few minutes if it’s a popular article. For less popular ones it may go unseen for longer periods. And remember, you can always fix it yourself unless they semi-protect it (which is absolutely asinine, if you ask me).

5

Thanks folks. Ignorance fought.

6

I ran across some subtle vandalism on a semi-protected article recently-- a guy added a plausible-looking generic name for Viagra, something like micoxaphalin… say it phonetically for the joke-- and simply had to log-in to my Wikipedia account to be able revert it. It had been up for several days when I ran across it. Locked articles are the problematic ones.

I hate running across vandalism that has withstood the test of time, with good edits being made since then; you can’t just do a revert, or you would lose the good new material, and you can’t just edit out the vandalism since it’s possible (and IME probable) that the vandal broke other stuff that isn’t as obvious, like changing last name spellings or altering dates, and you need to check out the edits made by the vandal to see the extent of the damage. I’ve had to dig back through years of history to find the source of vandalism on some pages, use the “compare selected versions” feature to figure out how much had changed, then go to the current page and hand edit everything to bring it back into line.

7

The reasoning is that most vandals don’t bother registering or register right before their vandalism attack.

8

Yeah, but then people like me with good intentions can’t fix it and have to hope that someone with that oh-so-special-can’t-possibly-be-a-vandal screen name fixes it.

I suppose I could get a screen name, but I might make 5 edits a year, and most of them are grammar related or vandalism reverts.