2008/5/3 michael west michawest@gmail.com:
The google cache is not a problem for Wikipedia, though it was an attempt to explain a modus operandae of editors who vandalise a page and quickly restores it to an unvandalised state. Assuming good faith would point to it being a test edit. The real motive is possibly sinister and the google cache may well display the "is a jerk" edit.
I'm not sold on this as anything more than a convenient way of justifying an assumption of it being malicious.
The google cache for a given page updates anything from daily to once a month. If we assume they vandalise, leave it for two minutes, and clean up, then they're doing this with - at best - a 0.15% chance of having the vandalism cached. On a low traffic page (most are), it becomes even smaller.
It seems implausible that anyone would on the one hand be cunning and subtle enough to systematically think of the google cache, but on the other not realise how much of a waste of time this would be.