[WikiEN-l] The Times on Wikipedia

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 8:06 PM, WODUP <wikiwodup at gmail.com> wrote:
> The article says "The most notable instance of this was on the night Barack
> Obama won the American election. I found that his entire, detailed entry
> disappeared for nearly an hour - to be replaced with the one-line entry,
> "Barack Obama is the new SOCIALIST President of the United States of
> America."", but the closest I could find was this
> edit<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=249916284&oldid=prev>that
> lasted for about one minute. I wonder what she saw.

It's possible that she didn't refresh, that her browser was dumb, or
that mediawiki's  purge of the front end cache was lost and anons saw
an old version for longer. (The last of these is not likely but it is
possible— but every edit is another chance for the caches to get clued
in... so in that case user error still seems likely)

Perhaps we should have a "Wikipedia for reporters" page which details
things like how to check how long some particular edit persisted.