https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/0 ... e-stories/
It was the summer of 2010 and I was the new boy on the news desk at a national newspaper. On the Friday night in question I had been in the office since 7am and was running on empty. Part of my job was to write short captions for pictures that came in late, and that night it was a photo of a woman at the Big Chill music festival. Keen to get out of the office, I turned to Wikipedia and did a bit of copy-and-paste to fill up the caption space. I forgot all about it until Monday morning, when it turned out I’d failed to realise that the Wikipedia entry had been hacked and I’d blindly copy-and-pasted that “The Big Chill was founded in 1994 as the Wanky Balls festival in North London”. The mistake went viral. “Reading and Leeds? We’d rather go to Wanky Balls Festival” read the headline in NME, #wankyballs was trending on Twitter, and the poor photographer had to issue a statement that the caption was nothing to do with him. I was mortified. But I later heard that a north London pub had plans to put on a real Wanky Balls Festival. I’m not sure if it ever happened.
– Simon, 43, London