Wikipedia:Article hijack

Not to be confused with Wikipedia:Don't hijack references or Wikipedia:Cuckoo editing.

Article hijacking occurs when an existing Wikipedia article (or portions of it) is substantially changed from one subject to an entirely different one. This is separate from ordinary editing, renaming or merging in that the original subject is effectively replaced, while the page history, talk page and other properties remain connected to the old subject.

Background

Hijacking articles is never helpful. Not only does it cause loss of the original article, but even when that original article has no worthwhile content, combining content of two completely different articles into the history of one page causes confusion.

Article hijacking is most commonly done by new editors who are not autoconfirmed and therefore cannot create new articles directly. A much better way of dealing with that restriction is to start new articles in the draft namespace or go through Articles for creation (AfC). Of course, it is also sometimes done by spammers and undisclosed paid editors who are deliberately trying to circumvent these processes.

While it is most common with articles, this can also occur with other pages, such as redirects, disambiguation, and drafts. If you follow a redirect and end up at an entirely unexpected target, checking the history is always prudent. In obvious cases, a bold correction is the most efficient solution.

Examples

The following are examples of article hijacking:

• Alone and Unarmed, a Soviet film, becomes a software advertisement.
• Australian cricketer Joel Joseph becomes a Tanzanian music manager.
• Retired American soccer midfielder Josh Keller becomes actor Josh Heller.
• Pakistani general Abdullah Saeed becomes an American TV producer.
• A prehistoric marsupial becomes a clan of an Indian caste.
• A genus of pig becomes Donald Trump
• The disambiguation page for Sacrorum, written in 2009, is moved to "C. L. Services, Inc" in 2016 and its content completely erased by an advertisement for a logistics company in Atlanta, and has to be history-merged back into the original page in 2020.
• A 2005 song by Wyclef Jean, composed for the movie Hotel Rwanda, becomes a 2012 song by Otto Knows.

• The article hijack went unnoticed for 12 years.
• The WikiProject banner was never changed.
• The article history had to be split.
• Talk page sections had to be archived and moved.
• Wikidata information had to be adjusted, because Albanian Wikipedia did not change with the release of the 2012 song.
• Errors were made during the untangling.

How to respond

If you come across a hijacked page, the appropriate response is to boldly revert to the last good version of the page and leave a note on the hijacker's talk page. Twinkle provides the option to post a warning regarding hijacking pages. This can also be done manually with the template below.

Assess whether anything else requires cleanup, such as talk page banners, page history, improperly targeted redirects or broken Wikidata elements. If the hijack has gone unnoticed for a while, accumulating a substantial revision history, a history split may be necessary to untangle it.

Template

The following template exists to warn editors for hijacking pages:

• {{subst:uw-hijacking}}

See also

• Wikipedia:History splitting, a technical process useful for repairing this situation
• Wikipedia:Requests for history merge, where one can request a history split