User:Lethe/failures

the password list debacle
 Wikipedians, in their infinite wisdom, voted not to delete a page which exposed users' passwords, because the users in question were probably trolls. Developer Brion Vibber said this about it:

 Nonetheless, this list was at best borderline with respect to our privacy policy. I deleted it as soon as I was made aware it was still here (I'd been under the impression it had been deleted within hours of originally being posted, and no one has contacted me or the developers team about it that I'm aware of). If the site admins here on en.wikipedia.org didn't remove it, that's a group failure and I'm rather disappointed.

--Brion Vibber, Chief Technical Officer, Wikimedia Foundation. 22:37, May 31, 2005 (UTC)

spreading misinformation via wikipedia
Viajero included the following line to the original version of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake article


 * "Priests of the inquisition roamed the city, rounding up "heretics" and hanging them on the spot for angering God"

It stayed in the article for years, spreading all over the Internet, and was eventually quoted in the Washington Post, and from there it was tracked down by some Catholic who knew it to be obviously false. This resulted in bad press for Wikipedia, and then he was asked by Jimbo himself where that information had come from, to which Viajero (who is an administrator and so a trusted member) apparently never replied.