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by Marshall Brain and Tim Crosby
Someone at the CIA is editing Wikipedia entries about lightsabers. How do we know? The Wikipedia Scanner. Virgil Griffith created the WikiScanner to catch politicians, corporations and government agencies in the act of trying to change their Wikipedia entries anonymously.
When a bunch of Twitter geeks get excited about the same thing at the same time, their chatter can crash the whole service. And that's when the dreaded Fail Whale appears.