Hindi page vandalized on Wikipedia

MUMBAI: After ‘Gandhi’ doing a pole-dance on Youtube.com, here comes another bad news for all Indians, and this time the target is Hindi, the national language.

Some hacker has defaced the page on “Hindi” language on the popular website Wikipedia.org.

The hacker has added the phrase, “the language of the pimps” in bold font on the page where it is most visible. The phrase appears twice on the whole page.

There is a possibility that a large number of users would view this hacked page, as this is the page that Google throws up first while searching with “Hindi” as a keyword.

Of late, there has been a drastic increase in vandalism to against India and Indians on the web. There have been cases where a burning national flag has been depicted on Orkut.com.

Indian administration has been known to act in extremes while reacting to such acts, either it will be too slow or it will just go ahead and block the page in the India. Neither of them are the best solutions.

 It has to be noted that the government of India does not have a committee of technocrats and lawyers, an online ombudsman of sort that can take care of such issues.

Coming back to Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia has had a history of such vandal acts and the pages that are most often vandalized are locked for editing. For instance, the page on “India” has been locked for editing.

The policy of the website has been often criticized in the past, as it allows unregistered users to edit pages. However, it must be mentioned that most of the vandalism is caught and quickly reverted by "RC patrollers" or Wikinerds who spend their time online as a vandalism vigilante squad.

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