User:HalfHeartedFanatic/sandbox/A History of Todd Howard's Wikipedia Presence

Over the course of Wikipedia's history, Wikipedia articles on Todd Howard and related topics have been consistently targeted with disruptive edits and/or vandalism. For now, this essay's primary focus is on Todd Howard's article's edit history and the application of Wikipedia's policies, although the scope of this article may be broadened in the future.

Early history

User:Framed0000, who no longer seems to be active as of September 2012, created the Todd Howard article on 15 November 2005. The stub consisted of two sentences, weighing in at a mere 228 bytes, with no references whatsoever. Veteran editors should notice that this article came into existence not long after the Siegenthaler incident, which catalyzed a number of changes in Wikipedia policy, governance, and functionality, the most pertinent of which is WP:BLP.

Less than two months later, on 27 December, an IP user then made an edit to the Todd Howard article consisting of two more unsourced sentences. This edit may be considered the first instance of vandalism on that article, since it could fall under the already-existing definition of defamation and/or libel included in the then-current draft of the WP:BLP policy proposal. Twenty days later, on 16 January 2006, another IP user removed the offending content.

The next instance of suspected vandalism would not come until 30 May 2007, when an IP user edited the growing article, adding content that would have definitely violated WP: BLP. A little more than an hour later, User:TimVickers reverted the vandalism. A little more than a month later, on 3 July, another IP user added defamatory criticism of Todd Howard to the article, which was deleted by yet another IP user almost two hours later. On 20 July, an IP user (perhaps unintentionally) added gibberish to the end of a paragraph, which User:Darkyre erased eighteen minutes later. For the next few months, some copyediting/external link improvements were sporadically added to the article. The first instance of vandalism from a logged-in user happened on 5 November 2007, when the user blanked the page as part of a short-lived, fast-paced page-blanking spree. User:MER-C then reverted the page shortly afterward, while the attacker was being blocked. Four days later, User:Chris Chittleborough added the article's first citation. On 14 November, five days later, an IP user added an unsourced statement and then expanded upon it; User:Gilliam reverted these edits shortly thereafter.

The article was left unedited for a while until an IP user vandalized the article on 30 May 2008, which User:Cluebot (the original) then reverted.

External links

• The "Todd Howard" tag on Tumblr