BearMachine

Introduction

I totally don't get vandalism. Well, some of it I get. After all, why not assert that everyone at a certain university smokes dope? Why not assert that someone [you've probably never met] is the biggest whore you know? But some other things are less explicable.

The Completely Inexplicable

For example, someone changed the lead-in to the Analog computers page from:

An analog computer (spelled analogue in British English)...

to:

An pagal computer (spelled analogue in British English)...

I was not able to identify a reason something might think to do that.

Another time, someone added a phrase, resulting in the following sentence:

Tegan lives in Vancouver, BC. Sara lives in Montreal, and is a goat.

(Guess which part comprises the vandalism ;p .)

The Pointless

Another example is where someone added "English is the greatest Lang.->toll,supi" and "sau gut" to a page. What was the point? Were they being ironic?

The Fame-seeking

Another example is the following paragraph, added to an article on the so-called "fattest" city in Canada:

"Although the city is polluted with the highest number of gyms per capita, the gym's remain barren. Fulton's in the heart of the city is one of the prominent gym's in the region. It was first established by entrepreneur [name redacted]. The gym estbalished it's popularity by catering to local celebrity's including Bill Delainey and Adam Gravelle."

This same person went into several pages and changed phrases such as "studies show..." and "it has been reported that..." to "[name redacted] has shown..." and "[same name redacted] has reported that..." respectively.

In a similarly amusing act of vandalism, one person repeatedly claimed that "Tegan and Sara have often been seen around town with popular New York teen [name redacted]."

The Inexplicable and Possibly Statistical

One IP inexplicably changed Rickie Lee Jones's name to Roxanne Lee Jones 5 or 6 times. An examination of their contributions page showed about 20 similar changes being made between two and six times each. Was it an experiment to see how quickly the introduced errors were corrected? I guess We'll Never Know.

The Creepy

One IP address twice added a rather detailed fantasy about the deaths and disappearances of members of a popular band, in the style of a news article. It's hard to imagine the mindset of a person who would do that sort of thing, really.

The Carefully-Edited

I think my favorite type of vandalism is where the vandal will make one edit where they'll add a bunch of obviously made-up stuff, then another edit where they move one sentence around, then one where they'll change the punctuation...It's like, wow, all that trouble, just to have your vandalism removed right away. It's almost an art form for some people, I think.

Conclusion

In digressive and strangely-formatted conclusion:

This user is a participant in
WikiProject Robotics.