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Inside the game of sports vandalism on Wikipedia


The following content has been republished from the Wikimedia Blog. The views expressed in this piece are those of the author alone; responses and critical commentary are invited in the comments section. For more information on this partnership see our content guidelines.

Some say online reporting of Wikipedia vandalism should have ended then.

“Media reports of Wikipedia vandalism are more than a decade obsolete,” said Howard Rheingold, who helped to develop early crowdsourced projects and social networks, and taught about them at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University. “Wikipedia has always worked,” Rheingold said, because the number of people “who have the power to revert to a previous version with one click has vastly outnumbered the number of vandals.”

The reports of vandalism continue, some even noting that the edits are gone in an instant, but immortalized in blogs.

The New England Sports Network reported on Dec. 28 about vandalism to New England Patriots’ player Matt Slater’s Wikipedia page the day before. The edit cited in the blog post disappeared in five minutes, and NESN noted “the sarcastic jokes were quickly removed.” The post then showed the vandalized articles, noting:

“But nothing ever really disappears on the Internet, as the following screen shots prove.”


Jeff Elder is the digital communications manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. This post originally appeared at the Wikimedia Blog.