Curious enough, the first change on the Wikipedia article on Bhagat Singh was on 13 feb, 23:13 hours [1], even before this news started circulating.
People kept on changing and reverting it between Feb 14, 1931 and March 23 as his death date [2]. Even a regular user changed it to Feb 14 once.
It was even tweeted by an Exective Director of IBN7 and later retweeted by Actor Madhaven ( tweeted by somebody else)
Blogs on this also started coming up [3]
By noon, I saw this on twitter and fully protected it temporarily. [4] At that time, i believe there were more than 30+ changes on death date.
I began to check for sources & later I added it to the Wikipedia article [5] with references to reliable sources like history artcles of
gov.in
Later , I reduced the protection of the page to semi-protection for a week. [6]
These kinds of sensational vandalism always occurs, but I am sharing this as an example of how those monitoring social media can watch out for similar activities on Wikipedia.
When I tweeted that March 23 is the actual date , one person replied that similar to "yes, why the confusion?.. Wikipedia says so. " . It also explains how people look upon Wikipedia as a reliable source of information.
I had similar examples when there was rumors of the death of leader like YSR and Jyothi Basu. Social media "killed" Jyothi Basu days before his actual death and I had to semi protect the page similarly to prevent the next day newspaper saying "Wikipedia killed Jyothi Basu". :)
There were also some new reports on the Bhagat Singh controversy last 2days. [7]
Regards
Tinu Cherian