It didn’t take long for the vandals to force their way in.Hannah was eating a bowl of Mini-Wheats in the kitchen when she got the breaking-news alert on her phone. The words made her jump from her chair. She shouted at her dad and darted upstairs to her bedroom. Then she opened her laptop, found her Wikipedia watchlist and clicked on one of her most frequented pages: Mike Babcock.“Honestly, it’s kind of like a race,” said the criminology student who had logged on as her alter ego, HickoryOughtShirt?4. “It’s not supposed to be but that’s how I view it. It’s a race to be the first one to edit it.”The Toronto Maple Leafs’ decision to fire their head coach in the middle of an ugly road trip sent shockwaves through the hockey world. It’s the type of news that picks up steam quickly. Most hockey fans go online to sites like Twitter or Reddit to share their thoughts, opinions and GIFs.But a few have their fun another way — by anonymously falsifying information on Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia.“I already saw a ton of vandalism that I immediately reverted, it happens so quickly,” Hannah said about that Wednesday afternoon.The first unwanted article edit came in at 4:48 p.m., when an unregistered user changed Babcock’s occupation to “Unemployed Loser” just 18 minutes after the Leafs announced his ousting on Twitter. Vandalizing Wikipedia articles has become common in the sports world, where a screenshot of even a short-lived edit to an article can go viral on social media.According to hockey fans who used Wikipedia to vent, Babcock coached a joke of a team and loves to sit his star players so he can play fourth liners; he served fries as the head coach of the McDonald’s Morons; his current team is Robidas Island; he’s a dictator, eats a lot and is the worst coach in Leafs history.Those are just the PG-13 comments.Hannah, who chose to ...
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