For this blog post, I looked at a few historical events on Wikipedia and looked at the revision histories of these events.
Boston Marathon Bombing – April 15, 2013
I thought that it would be interesting to look at a case of an event occurring when Wikipedia was already mainstream, and this was the first that I thought of. This case is especially interesting because the case developed over the next week or so as they looked for the offenders. There are lots of back and forth edits at the start of the article’s history that reflect this. It was also almost immediately that this article became locked to approved editors; I imagine that lots of unverified information would have been on the page without this lock.
Great Molasses Flood – January 15, 1919
The first version of this article came out in 2001 and was just a couple sentences long. Over time, more details were added and recent edits are fixing typos or changing the language to be more neutral.
2024 AT&T Outage – February 22, 2024
This is a topic that is coming out TODAY, so it will be interesting to see how this article plays out. It does say that this issue is ongoing and there is an official Wikipedia warning that “this article may not meet Wikipedia’s general notability guideline.” The post has only had 7 edits and started out with only two short paragraphs. I added the first discussion post regarding that they should add more information regarding how AT&T and other municipalities contacted users about the outage.
Comments
Looking at such a recent Wikipedia entry is such a smart idea! You get to see how the edits have already started to unfold in pretty real-time. I do like that Wikipedia gives you a warning based on how new the entry is, I think it helps to curtail misinformation from spreading.