Cached Wikipedia Vandalism

October 2, 2011 10:18 AM

Why does Wikipedia show an old article revision on my phone?

While looking up a quick fact about TNG today, I encountered a strange phenomenon. I went to this page from my Android phone (via Verizon 3G). I've never visited the page previously. There was some obvious vandalism (see this version) which I decided to log in from my computer to fix. Lo and behold, it isn't actually in the article anymore. Odd. So I refreshed the page from my mobile, and it still shows the vandalism (for a moment I thought it had been corrected in the time it took me to pull it up on the PC). Even if I view it in Desktop mode from my phone, or go into the history list and click on the newest revision manually, I still see the vandalized edit. However, if I compare versions I can see the most recent fixed article. So, what gives? Is Verizon caching Wikipedia pages?

Googling did turn up this vaguely related page.

posted by nzero to Technology (3 answers total)

I see the cached vandalism too, on my home desktop. Wikipedia's servers occasionally cache strange things, and then don't update until another change is made to the article. I made a small tweak to give the server cache a boot in the butt; try loading the page now and see if you see the correct version.
posted by badgermushroomSNAKE at 11:20 AM on October 2, 2011

Indeed. Thanks for the info.
posted by nzero at 12:05 PM on October 2, 2011

WP:PURGE is the mechanism to take care of this.
posted by dhartung at 9:43 PM on October 2, 2011