As a faithful House fan, I was as shocked as anyone that Kal Penn's character Dr. Lawrence Kutner committed suicide. (I could see Taub, Thirteen or even Wilson harboring suicidal thoughts, but not my Kumar!) I'm also an avid Wikipedia surfer, and I know just how fast these articles get updated when events occur - fictional or otherwise. I wanted to see what the article for Dr. Kutner said about the character's death.
What you have to realize about Wikipedia is that when news breaks, hordes of people trip over themselves and each other to be the first to update this cornucopia of human knowledge. So when I arrive at the article, there's graffiti everywhere! And it changes everytime you refresh the page. A lot of it was short little sentences added at the bottom or top of the page. Apparently by 14-year-olds: "WTF is going on?" "y did he kill himself?" "OMG Kutner died?" My favorite was a sentence added to the very end: "The primary suspect in his death is Neal Patrick Harris."
When I clicked "edit" to clean up the graffiti and put "NPH wouldn't do a thing like that" in the explanation, I got a message that the article was locked for editing, and at this time could only be edited by wikipedia administrators. It's still locked, the next morning. I guess it's a good thing they do this, otherwise articles would get all sorts of screwed up everytime there's some breaking news in the world.


Comments: 20
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Any modification to a fully protected page should be discussed on its talk page or in another appropriate forum. Once consensus has been established for the change, any administrator may make the necessary edits to the protected page. Placing the {{editprotected}} template on the talk page can draw attention to discussions about edits to protected pages."
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