On 7th November, 2013, a bug in the system led to a large number of IP users in Europe (and possibly beyond) receiving a notification warning them about an act of vandalism on Aidan Turner (such as this one). Some of the locations affected include:
- The University of Oxford
- Germany
- Warwickshire, England
- Bolton, England
- Sweden
- South Wales
- Nottingham, England
- London, England
- Athens, Greece
What had happened is that the vandal edit was registered as coming from 2620:0:862:1:91:198:174:70, which is a Wikimedia cluster server. The server was a newly installed Varnish server that was using an IPv6 address, which the Wikimedia software was not configued to handle properly, resulting in edits being incorrectly attributed by the servers. Because of this, when I proceeded to warn the IP for these edits, a large number of IPs who were browsing Wikipedia at the time received an Orange Bar of Death informing them that they had new messages. When they clicked on this, they were taken to User talk:2620:0:862:1:91:198:174:70 where these warnings were place. Editors were quick to let me know about this both on User talk:2620:0:862:1:91:198:174:70 and on my talk page (with the sum total of 2 trouts and 1 whale!). From reading these messages, I picked up on the following points made by various IPs:
- Nobody knows who Aidan Turner is!
- One user feels I am "a silly man".
- One user can't spell "definitely" (although another user was quick to pick them up on this).
- One users hopes that messages = friends
- The "lads" at Wikipedia "do a great job" (not my words - I'm well aware we have many female editors who also do "a great job").
- Despite having had over 10,000 good faith edits under my belt, one user felt that "there comes a time when whatever good you've done gets heavily outweighed by the amount of people you anger with these false positives" (I guess that depends on how many people this bug affected).
- Its the strangest thing that's happened to a user in 5+ years of using Wikipedia.
- It amused a user at work.
- One user writes in his sleep.
- Someone was confused (weren't we all).
- Staff of the Wikimedia Foundation should now be known addressed with the greeting "Yo, wikimedia people".
- Any edits that are "counterproductive to the aims of wikipedia" are "a simply outrageous thing to do" (now why can't everyone think this way?).
Eventually, both of these talk pages were given a 3 hour semi-block and this put an end to the bombardment of messages from understandably confused IPs. The bug was logged a Bugzilla (the report can be found here) and was reported as fixed by 13:00 (UTC) the next day - just over 14 hours after the incident happened.