andalism

Main article: Vandalism on Wikipedia

Any change or edit that manipulates content in a way that purposefully compromises
Wikipedia's integrity is considered vandalism. The most common and obvious types of
vandalism include additions of obscenities and crude humor; it can also include advertising and
other types of spam.[76] Sometimes editors commit vandalism by removing content or entirely
blanking a given page. Less common types of vandalism, such as the deliberate addition of
plausible but false information, can be more difficult to detect. Vandals can introduce irrelevant
formatting, modify page semantics such as the page's title or categorization, manipulate the
article's underlying code, or use images disruptively. [77]

American journalist John Seigenthaler (1927–2014), subject of the Seigenthaler incident.

Obvious vandalism is generally easy to remove from Wikipedia articles; the median time to
detect and fix it is a few minutes.[78][79] However, some vandalism takes much longer to detect
and repair.[80]
In the Seigenthaler biography incident, an anonymous editor introduced false information into
the biography of American political figure John Seigenthaler in May 2005, falsely presenting
him as a suspect in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.[80] It remained uncorrected for four
months.[80] Seigenthaler, the founding editorial director of USA Today and founder of
the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University, called Wikipedia co-
founder Jimmy Wales and asked whether he had any way of knowing who contributed the
misinformation. Wales said he did not, although the perpetrator was eventually traced. [81][82] After
the incident, Seigenthaler described Wikipedia as "a flawed and irresponsible research tool".
[80]
 The incident led to policy changes at Wikipedia for tightening up the verifiability of
biographical articles of living people.[83]
In 2010, Daniel Tosh encouraged viewers of his show, Tosh.0, to visit the show's Wikipedia
article and edit it at will. On a later episode, he commented on the edits to the article, most of
them offensive, which had been made by the audience and had prompted the article to be
locked from editing.[84][8