I did not know who Richard Sherman was until last night.
When Twitter exploded with Twit-rage over something Sherman said, I didn’t know what everyone was talking about because I didn’t watch the end of the San Francisco-Seattle football game.
So I searched Sherman’s name and then clicked on his Wikipedia page, and saw this (highlighting added):
Well, that certainly caught my interest, and it wasn’t too hard to find out what happened.
By the time I clicked back on Wikipedia, the “human garbage” entry was gone, replaced by a more neutral analysis.
Looking back at the Edit History of the page, it’s easy to see that the moment after the interview, there were numerous attempts to “vandalize” the page (times are expressed in GMT):
Some of the vandalism was kinda funny:
Some were not:
The page pretty quickly was “protected” by Wikipedia “editors.”
Remember, Wikipedia is a crowdsourced website, and anyone can add anything, subject to monitoring by others. That can be good and bad.
In the case of Sherman, it was for the good that editors could monitor and protect the page from extraneous insults.
In the case of the Elizabeth Warren page, however, this crowdsourcing and monitoring was used to keep out factual information regarding her Cherokee scandal.
So take Wikipedia for what it is worth, the good and the bad.
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