TWIGO:CP Deletion Incident

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The TWIGO:CP Deletion Incident was an occurrence on RationalWiki that is more notable for its technical effects than for its effects on the RW community.

On January 14, 2009, somebody posted personal information about the Conservapedia sysop Karajou to the WIGO:CP talk-page.[1] This was in violation of the RationalWiki privacy policy, which forbids publication of any personal information not released into the public domain by the person concerned.[2]

The newly-demoted bureaucrat TheoryOfPractice, having no intimate knowledge of the inner-workings of MediaWiki, and well-known for possessing a short fuse, overreacted and immediately vaporized the entire page.[1] This broke all diff-links to the page, causing immediate angry reactions.[3]

When attempts were made to rectify this situation, it was found that since the page had contained over 37,000 edits, its deletion had completely locked up the Wiki's database. A small lynch-mob began forming, despite repeated apologies from TheoryOfPractice.[4][5]

Tmtoulouse had to take down the database for an hour to fix it as the mob spilled over onto RationalWikiWiki.[6] Later, in the midst of a debate about whether to enable the Oversight extension, Tmtoulouse overruled everyone and issued a fiat decree about site policy: Oversight would be enabled.[7] Later, this was moderated to RevisionDelete powers for all sysops.

A similar event occurred when Ed Poor deleted the "VfD" file at Wikipedia.[8]

[edit] References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Conservapedia_Talk:What_is_going_on_at_CP%3F&diff=293074&oldid=293073
  2. ↑ http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=RationalWiki:Community_Standards&oldid=391923#Privacy
  3. ↑ http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/Conservapedia_Talk:What_is_going_on_at_CP%3F/Archive107#Deleted_and_re-created....
  4. ↑ http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Conservapedia_Talk:What_is_going_on_at_CP%3F&diff=293074&oldid=293073
  5. ↑ http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/RationalWiki:Saloon_bar/Archive1#Look.2C_I_am_sorry
  6. ↑ http://rationalwikiwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:TheoryOfPractice&oldid=9764
  7. ↑ http://rationalwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Debate:Should_we_enable_Oversight%3F&diff=next&oldid=293827
  8. ↑ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2005-08-08/Deletion_deletion
Retrieved from "http://www.rationalwikiwiki.org/wiki/TWIGO:CP_Deletion_Incident"
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