User:Oddbodz/The Day I Warned Everyone

On 7th November, 2013, a bug in the system led to a large number of IP users in Europe (and possibly beyond) receiving a notification warning them about an act of vandalism on Aidan Turner (such as this one). Some of the locations affected include:

• The University of Oxford
• Germany
• Warwickshire, England
• Bolton, England
• Sweden
• South Wales
• Nottingham, England
• London, England
• Athens, Greece

What had happened is that the vandal edit was registered as coming from

!). From reading these messages, I picked up on the following points made by various IPs:

• Nobody knows who Aidan Turner is!
• One user feels I am "a silly man".
• One user can't spell "definitely" (although another user was quick to pick them up on this).
• One users hopes that messages = friends
• The "lads" at Wikipedia "do a great job" (not my words - I'm well aware we have many female editors who also do "a great job").
• Despite having had over 10,000 good faith edits under my belt, one user felt that "there comes a time when whatever good you've done gets heavily outweighed by the amount of people you anger with these false positives" (I guess that depends on how many people this bug affected).
• Its the strangest thing that's happened to a user in 5+ years of using Wikipedia.
• It amused a user at work.
• One user writes in his sleep.
• Someone was confused (weren't we all).
• Staff of the Wikimedia Foundation should now be known addressed with the greeting "Yo, wikimedia people".
• Any edits that are "counterproductive to the aims of wikipedia" are "a simply outrageous thing to do" (now why can't everyone think this way?).

Eventually, both of these talk pages were given a 3 hour

) the next day - just over 14 hours after the incident happened.

Notes

• The locations I have listed are only locations that were given on the talk pages. The map includes these, and also countries which were determined by finding the location of the IPs who posted on the talk pages
• I have included the points from messages in good faith - if your comment is included then please take it this way (they made me chuckle).
• I would like to thank Writ Keeper and Drmies for helping me respond to the affected editors and for keeping my talk page in shape.

Userboxes

Userbox 1

If you've managed to do the same as me, feel free to add this userbox to your user page:

You can do this by using this code:

{{User:Oddbodz/The Day I Warned Everyone/Userbox}}

Userbox 2

If you don't know who Aidan Turner is either, feel free to add this userbox to your user page

You can do this by using this code:

{{User:Oddbodz/The Day I Warned Everyone/Userbox 2}}