Back in autumn of 2020 we had an school assignment to edit #Wikipedia. We were then going to follow what would happen with that edit for a couple days.
Some didn't have enough understanding of what goes into an edit, and got it quickly rolled back either by bots or by humans (and our school's IP very quickly got blocked as they usually end up being on Wikipedia, for those who weren't making the edits at home). I of course knew a bit more and made a good edit to a page adding some info with the necessary references attached to it.
But one classmate of mine had another idea. What if, we embed a little bit of a hoax in an existing page, add some tangentially related references from credible sources to disguise it, and see how long it will last? Our teacher and us two would end up speculating on how long it would stay up before someone took notice.
It ended up surviving the first weeks where it would have been scrutinised by bots and humans lurking the Recent Changes page. And after that point it seems like it would end up remaining there.
We then graduated in 2023 and the edit was still there at that point. Fast forward to today and it is still there, 5 years later...
...Uh, maybe it's time to say something about it by now? I probably should.
ROllerozxa
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2025-05-16 10:11:35 UTC
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"content": "Back in autumn of 2020 we had an school assignment to edit #Wikipedia. We were then going to follow what would happen with that edit for a couple days.\n\nSome didn't have enough understanding of what goes into an edit, and got it quickly rolled back either by bots or by humans (and our school's IP very quickly got blocked as they usually end up being on Wikipedia, for those who weren't making the edits at home). I of course knew a bit more and made a good edit to a page adding some info with the necessary references attached to it.\n\nBut one classmate of mine had another idea. What if, we embed a little bit of a hoax in an existing page, add some tangentially related references from credible sources to disguise it, and see how long it will last? Our teacher and us two would end up speculating on how long it would stay up before someone took notice.\n\nIt ended up surviving the first weeks where it would have been scrutinised by bots and humans lurking the Recent Changes page. And after that point it seems like it would end up remaining there.\n\nWe then graduated in 2023 and the edit was still there at that point. Fast forward to today and it is still there, 5 years later...\n\n...Uh, maybe it's time to say something about it by now? I probably should.",
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