President Barack Obama is Americas' first African American President. I was happy to hear that my country was open to something else besides old white dudes when he was elected. I am very sad that not everyone feels the same way about the United States new president as I do.
According to MSN on 2/17/09 around 12:00am Eastern Time someone erased all the existing content on President Obama in Wikipedia and replaced the page with an awful derogatory racial slur repeated three times.
Wikipedia quickly erased the racial slur within two minutes; sadly Google's spider crawled Wikipedia within those two minutes and picked up the racial slur for everyone to see that typed in the words Barack Obama on the Google search engine until approximately 4:00 PM Eastern Standard Time when it was removed after some inquires from MSNBC.
Wikipedia can be a dangerous site when used by the wrong people. I hope that Wikipedia will place safeguards so that those words will never be posted again about anyone regardless of their hierarchy in society.
What I find interesting from a geeks point of view is the timing that the Google Spider bot searched Wikipedia and when the slanderous post went up were at the exact same time. I believe that this was more than coincidence. I think this was a planned out attack from someone who had to have studied the Google bot extensively for a long period of time.
I find Google's response on removing the content from the search engines database inadequate to say the least. Google did not remove the content from the search engine fast enough; furthermore shouldn't there bot be programmed not to index pages with racial slurs?
On a closing note I think it is sad to see racism is still in the world and even worse that people are using Wikipedia to target President Barack Obama.