Ancient WP history - Main Page broken

[Bbb23sucks]

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... did=139946

This edit shows that at some point there was an issue with the main page, subsequent edits show editors trying (and failing) to fix it. A few edits later, it appeared to be fixed.

Does anyone know what happened?

[ericbarbour]

Front-page vandalism was very commonplace in the first two years. They went thru a lot of argumentation about what to do.

Larry Sanger has something to say about it in one of his papers.

As a result, I grew both more protective of the project and increasingly sensitive to abuse of the system. As I tried to exercise what little authority I claimed, as a corrective to such abuse, many newer arrivals on the scene made great sport of challenging my authority. One of the earliest challenges happened in late summer, 2001. The front page of Wikipedia--then open to anyone to edit, like any other page on the project--was occasionally vandalized with infantile graffiti. Someone then tried to make an archive of the vandalism that had been done to the front page of Wikipedia. I maintained that to make such an archive would be to encourage such vandalism, so I deleted the archive. This occasioned much debate. Then a user made the archive a "subpage" of his own user page--and user pages were generally held to be the bailiwick of the user. Consequently I deleted that subpage, which occasioned a further hue and cry that, perhaps, I was abusing my authority. The vandalism-enshrining user in question proceeded to create a "deleted pages" page, on which the deleted vandalism archives were listed, as if to accuse me of trying to act without public scrutiny; but this was, of course, perfectly acceptable to me. At the time, I thought that this controversy was just as silly as it will sound to most people reading this; I thought that I needed only to "put my foot down" a little harder and, as had happened for the first six months of the project, participants would fall into line. What I did not realize was that this was to be only the first in a long series of controversies, the ultimate upshot of which was to undermine my own moral authority over the project and to make the project as safe as possible for the most abusive and contentious contributors.

[Bbb23sucks]

Front-page vandalism was very commonplace in the first two years. They went thru a lot of argumentation about what to do.

Larry Sanger has something to say about it in one of his papers.

As a result, I grew both more protective of the project and increasingly sensitive to abuse of the system. As I tried to exercise what little authority I claimed, as a corrective to such abuse, many newer arrivals on the scene made great sport of challenging my authority. One of the earliest challenges happened in late summer, 2001. The front page of Wikipedia--then open to anyone to edit, like any other page on the project--was occasionally vandalized with infantile graffiti. Someone then tried to make an archive of the vandalism that had been done to the front page of Wikipedia. I maintained that to make such an archive would be to encourage such vandalism, so I deleted the archive. This occasioned much debate. Then a user made the archive a "subpage" of his own user page--and user pages were generally held to be the bailiwick of the user. Consequently I deleted that subpage, which occasioned a further hue and cry that, perhaps, I was abusing my authority. The vandalism-enshrining user in question proceeded to create a "deleted pages" page, on which the deleted vandalism archives were listed, as if to accuse me of trying to act without public scrutiny; but this was, of course, perfectly acceptable to me. At the time, I thought that this controversy was just as silly as it will sound to most people reading this; I thought that I needed only to "put my foot down" a little harder and, as had happened for the first six months of the project, participants would fall into line. What I did not realize was that this was to be only the first in a long series of controversies, the ultimate upshot of which was to undermine my own moral authority over the project and to make the project as safe as possible for the most abusive and contentious contributors.

It didn't appear to be vandalism though, it was some sort of technical error or something. Amazing quote otherwise, so I <thanked> you.

[Criminal Minds]

Vandals can induce "technical errors":

https://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip ... roxy_links

If this works today it probably would have worked 20 years ago. The offending edits were probably erased.