When Jeremy Boggs, a graduate student in history at George Mason University, stepped away from American Idol to look up Langston Hughes’s Wikipedia page Tuesday night, he could scarcely have imagined that he’d end up helping to inform police about a threatened school shooting in St. Louis. Then again, the Internet can be a strange place, as an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch points out.
The Post-Dispatch has a complete blow-by-blow of Mr. Boggs’s unusual evening, but here’s the quick version: The page on Langston Hughes, it turned out, included a strange and threatening piece of vandalism (“I GO TO LIFT FOR LIFE ACADEMY… I’M GOING TO SHOOT EVERYBODY AT THAT SCHOOL…”). Unsure whether it was a prank or something more sinister, Mr. Boggs posted a message on Twitter, the instant-blogging service, asking his colleagues what to do.
The first response came from Marjorie McLellan, a history professor at Wright State University, in Ohio, who encouraged Mr. Boggs to call the police — and helped convene a Twitter task force, comprising several folks from across the country, that figured out where Lift for Life Academy was and how to contact local authorities.
In the end, their efforts weren’t necessary: When police arrived at the school Wednesday morning, they ascertained that the graffito on Wikipedia was a prank dreamed up by a sixth-grader who just happened to be studying Langston Hughes. But Mr. Boggs and Ms. McLellan will certainly remember the night that Wikipedia and Twitter helped them do some serious sleuthing. —Brock Read
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