A few observations:
- Vandalism and various other varieties of bad-faith editing was so severe that I've had to block 16 people and warn dozens more in a matter of a few hours, at the last count.
- Along with the usual page-defacers there were hordes of people trying to promote their websites, with some just linking to irrelevant blog posts in the external links section, others linking to pages they'd made of photos that had just been taken from Wikipedia or from news sites, but complete with anti-Islamic rants and other political stuff, and some even going so far as to add whole paragraphs to the world reaction section all about how they'd done something interesting over at their blog.
- It's wiki-blasphemy, I know, but my faith in fully open editing was left severely damaged. Most of the material in the article was written by a relatively small number of people, and was kept organised and consistent - and overseen and watched for vandalism - by a few more. Most of the anons who contributed caused an overall decline in the quality of the article, by introducing unsourced rumours that had to be squashed, duplicating what had already been said, or just generally leaving a path of destruction in their wake. In my humble opinion the article should have been protected in a way that allowed registered contributors only to contribute. The sheer number of people who must have been arriving at the page every second meant that even the most short-lived of vandalism will have greeted large numbers of readers.
- Edit conflicts were a nightmare, with several edits going through a minute in some cases. Major copyediting taking a few minutes had to be followed by frantic merging of anything worth keeping from the dozens of updates made since, although many simply overwrote other people's edits, causing much wikistress all round.
- It was interesting observing the pattern of editing. There were some odd periods of calm. Late last night (8 July) I did an overhaul and rearrangement and then the article stopped being edited for nearly an hour. I suspect this was because it was approaching 1am in the UK and most British Wikipedians had called it a night. There appear to have been other gaps in editing like this at various points in the article history.
- Looking around at what people had said about the article in their blogs was really encouraging, with some saying it was the best information they'd found, demonstrated to them that newspapers were rendered completely useless in times like this, and that web-based sources and particularly Wikipedia were the way forward, as well as all kinds of other praise.
- By the way, with your comment about the Pope article, we had an article on Ratzinger a long time before he became Pope (in about 2002 I think), and it was fairly extensive by the time of the conclave, so it's not quite accurate to say an article was immediately created, though as I recall it was moved to the new title within about ten seconds.
— Trilobite (Talk) 9 July 2005 17:17 (UTC)