D Fisher wrote:
Having been involved with wikipedia for only a few weeks, I have just had my first "personal" experience of vandalism, ie. someone deleted the bulk of an article I had written, leaving an unintelligible stub. Fortunately I have been able to pick up the original text and put it back. I know that there are set procedures for dealing with this, but I would like to ask: How often does this kind of thing happen? And can I assume that this is vandalism rather than a simple error (bearing in mind that the perpetrator doesn't have a proper ID?
It happens less often than I could have ever guessed -- I mean, it's pretty insane to have a website up where people can freely edit the pages, eh?
I think that it *might* be vandalism, or it *might* be an accident. Or it might be a combination of the two. Maybe someone saw the link saying they could edit the page, couldn't _believe_ that this was true, and tried it by deleting the whole page, assuming that there must be some "trick". Then, to their horror, they found that it worked, and fled in terror.
--Jimbo