Jackson Traffic Snarls Wikipedia

Wikipedia locked its Michael Jackson page, only allowing authorized users to make edits, after Thursday’s spike in traffic and flurry of posts about the pop singer’s death, according to sister blog BayNewser.

Wikimedia wrote in its tech blog, “We first noticed something was going on when IM services such as AOL Instant Messenger started logging people out. We quickly noticed that our own servers were hitting load spikes and suspected there was something going on.”

CNET reported that much of the traffic was caused by Wikipedians modifying the page to report his death, while other Wikipedians deleted those references. One comment read, “ONCE AGAIN, HE IS NOT DEAD, JUST STOP,” CNET wrote.

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