Explicit content ahead. Viewer discretion is advised.

Last week, I was on the Wikipedia page for fuck. It was not the random wandering it might sound like. I'd gotten there while looking up the etymology of the phrase "screw the pooch." You can imagine how. I was there to try to find out where the word comes from, and I guess unsurprisingly, no one's sure.

I'm in your wikipedia
defacing your pagez

Anyway, it looked like someone else had gotten there before me, and had decided to have a little fun. In the middle of the article, something like the 3rd or 4th sentence in the second paragraph, someone had written something like "ooooFUCKYOUfuckfuckfuckyouOOooOOoofuck!" After applauding him for his creativity, originality, and high-brow sense of humor, I went to edit the page to remove it. However, someone else had gotten to it before me.

I was informed by a friend that Wikipedia has bots that go through the site removing vulgarity. They work pretty quick, too, as the brilliant observation made by the gentleman quoted above was removed less than one minute after it had been added. When I was told that, I found myself wondering if the bots would be so quick to spot defacement that was more subtle, especially on a page that's full of vulgarity by necessity. So I hatched a scheme, one that if the guy who'd been on the page before me had seen it, may have responded in an awed "no way d00d, u r teh g31gh!"

I figured, what's the point of defacing Wikipedia if it's gonna be noticed and removed before you can even show it to your friends? I wanted something more insidious, something that'd make you go back and say "Hey, did I just read that right?" Not that I think that I'm some sort of evil mastermind for plotting to edit a webpage with malice aforethought, but I've been Trolling since the World Wide Web was getting slapped on its backside by its obstetrician, and I've never been satisfied with doing the same-old same-old, so I figured I had to do something to keep my hand in.

What I did was simple. At several points throughout the page, I inserted the adjective "fucking" into a sentence. For instance, "Non-English-speaking cultures tend to recognize the word's vulgarity, however, it is generally not censored as fucking frequently as in English-speaking cultures." You probably noticed it, as you had advanced warning it was coming. However, the bots that caught the other guy in under 60 seconds didn't spot it at all, and it was about an hour and a half before my "contribution" was noticed and removed.

Subtlety is the key. A friend of mine posted a comment to another page which is still there. I won't say what page, or what the comment was, because I want to see how long it'll be before someone notices it on their own. It's been there since sometime last year, and I find it hard to believe that no one's spotted it for what it is. I guess no one's paying attention. That's what I get for picking a page as high-profile as "fuck." Next time, I'll have to pick something like the page of Dame Edna. I bet it'd be years before someone spotted a fake comment lurking in there.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights