A few minutes had passed since AP News had created their article about the cyberattack. Wikipedia's 'Current events' portal wasn't quiet either due to Tropical Storm Choi-wan making landfall in the Philippines. For a while, aka the first part of June 2, no 'breaking-news' articles from the United States had been notable for a mention let along an article on Wikipedia. That was about to change.
At 16:50 UTC, Wikipedia editor 'Elijahandskip', an editor with 4,407 edits on Wikipedia, created the Wikipedia article for the cyberattack. The article was titled "Steamship Authority cyberattack" and had 1,123 bytes worth of data. That may sound like a lot, but in reality, that barely qualifies for a Wikipedia article. For perspective, the "Colonial Pipeline cyberattack" which took place less than a month earlier on May 7, 2021, has 27,757 bytes worth of data at the creation of this 'stub' article.
'Elijahandskip' created the article with a single sentence that was backed by three sources. Those sources were AP News, Fox News, and WBTS-CD (NBC Boston), and Wikipedia considers all three to be "reliable sources". 'Elijahandskip' also added a "see also" section to the article where he linked Wikipedia's article on the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack. The article was also tagged with a "Current event" tag, which tells editors that information could change quickly, so don't always trust exactly what the article says without verifying it yourself.
Thirteen minuites passed before the next editor decided to edit the article. This wasn't any ordinary editor though. This was a Wikipedia admin. At 17:03 UTC, Wikipedia admin 'Beland'[a] edited the article with a simple edit of replacing the link to the Wikipedia article about the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack and made it a link to Wikipedia's article of the "list of randomware attacks".
Another ten minutes elapse (17:13 UTC) before the next editor, 'Whoisjohngalt', an editor with over 15,000 edits on Wikipedia[b], decided to take a shot at editing the article. 'Whoisjohngalt' did a series of four edits on the article. The first edit added some more information to the article about some of the affects of the cyberattack. His second edit was two minutes (17:15 UTC) after the first edit, where a reference, from New England Cable News, for the new information was added. The third edit was three minutes later (17:18 UTC) where 'Whoisjohngalt' attempted to add the Steamship Authority cyberattack article to Wikipedia's "June 2021 crimes in the United States" category. I said it was an attempt, because some formatting error occured, which was fixed in the fourth edit a minute later.
What you just heard about was the history of the article's first thirty minutes, but there were other edits about the cyberattack around Wikipedia.
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[a] - Wikipedia admin 'Beland' has contributed 119,682 edits on Wikipedia as of 19:28 UTC on June 2, 2021.
[b] - Statistic for 'Whoisjohngalt' was taken at 20:43 UTC on June 2, 2021. At that time, 'Whereisjohngalt''s edit count was at 15,926.
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How Wikipedia Handled the Steamship Authority Cyberattack
غير روائيEveryone knows and uses Wikipedia to learn about anything whether it is wars, random places, or just random knowlege. Wikipedia also has the famous statement of "Anyone can edit". But do you know when that article you are reading was created and d...
