User:Ihaveahax/Mentioning Wikipedia

The rule of thumb is: if you mention Wikipedia in a song/movie/comic/etc., people will follow you and do what you did. Here are two examples.

The Oatmeal's Nikola Tesla comic
On The Oatmeal's website, there is a comic about Nikola Tesla. It explains what Tesla did, such as invent the lightbulb (Thomas Edison only sold it). At the end of the comic, there was an image saying "I will be editing Wikipedia in your honor.". The so-called edit was adding "Thomas Edison" to the Douchebag disambiguation page as the first item. There was also an arrow pointing at it saying "this needs to happen".

Later, there were several edits to the Douchebag page, most of them adding "Thomas Edison" to the top of the list. They were reverted. CharlieEchoTango then protected the page so unregistered and non-auto confirmed users cannot edit the page. Once it expired, Edison was listed again by an IP. CharlieEchoTango protected the page again, with the same settings. One registered user came along and added Edison one more time. It was reverted, then CharlieEchoTango placed full protection on the page (only administrators can edit) expiring January 2015. The reason was "Long-term full protection. This is unfortunate, but given the history of the page and the popularity of The Oatmeal, it's not likely to stop.".

This did not stop people from trying. Several IPs and users went to the talk page, requesting a single edit: adding Thomas Edison to the list. These requests were removed from the page, however you can find them in the edit history. One example is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Douchebag&oldid=502293184 where there were several edit requests mentioning Thomas Edison.

White & Nerdy song/music video
White & Nerdy is a song created by "Weird Al" Yankovic. The song talks about a person who is "white" and "nerdy" and explains stuff he has and does. At 1:49 in the video, the person is on a Macintosh computer on Wikipedia. He is editing/vandalizing the Atlantic Records article, replacing all the content with "YOU SUCK!" in large size with possibly the Impact font.

After the soon was uploaded, there were several people editing the Atlantic Records article, replacing all the content with "YOU SUCK!" in varying sizes. The page was semi-protected, however, people were still replacing all the content. The page is still semi-protected.

On the talk page of Atlantic Records, user Interlude 65 (technically Interlude65) placed a box at the header saying "PLEASE stop trying to imitate the "Weird Al" Yankovic music video for "White & Nerdy" by replacing the text of this article with "YOU SUCK!"".

Even with persistent vandalism and page protection, there are bots and humans that find and revert the vandalism very quickly.