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The cheeky fan even claimed he was the inspiration for their first single in the incredible ploy

A CHEEKY teenager blagged his way backstage at a rock gig by quickly changing the bands Wikipedia page to say he was the lead singers cousin.

Adam Boyd, from Crewe, was at The Sherlocks gig on Friday night at Manchesters Albert Hall when he came up with the genius idea to get a better view of the stage and ended up so close he could see their watches.

Adam Boyd/Guzelian

The music fan and his friends could barely see the stage after arriving late at the gig due to a delayed train, so he decided to take his chances after noticing a bouncer guarding the VIP section.

His plan was to pretend he was a relative of the indie band, and to back up his claim he decided to make quick changes to their Wikipedia page to use as proof.

And the cheeky fan even made up that he had been the inspiration for The Sherlocks hit 2014 single Live for the Moment.

A-level media student Adam, from Crewe, said:I cannot believe it worked. I was expecting to be kicked out for trying.

The Wikipedia idea came about due to my frustration of not being able to see any of the supporting band and worrying if Id have the same problem with The Sherlocks when they came on.

Because we were next to the bar downstairs, I looked up and saw the VIP entrance and told my friends Im going to try and get up there but they were calling me an idiot and saying I wouldnt get in.

Regardless I went up, made my way to the area, and realised I had no way of actually getting in. I needed an excuse, a reason to be let in.

I dont know how the idea climbed to the top of all the other drunken ones I was probably having then, but it came to me to change their Wiki page so I was included in it.

Adam Boyd/Guzelian

Adam Boyd/Guzelian

Adam changed the bands Wikipedia page to say he was cousin of lead singer Kiaran Crook and that he was the influence for the bands first single Live for the Moment.

Adam said: It wouldnt surprise me if I got a random person to spell-check (Wikipedia) for me.

Im usually quite confident with others when Im drunk, which probably helped in the situation with the bouncer.

From what I can remember, he had the rope going across the door, and refused to let me in, until I explained I was one of the band members cousins, and obviously he didnt believe that, either.

I was trying to find some way to prove I was family. Thats when I remembered about being credited on Wikipedia, although I had changed it minutes beforehand, and showed him he and said Fair enough and let me past.

I guess luck was on my side, either that or a gullible bouncer?

Adam Boyd/Guzelian

But despite Adam successfully getting into VIP, the novelty wore off and he said the area was hectic with photographers rushing around trying to get decent shots.

So after a few songs, Adam went back downstairs to be with his friends and enjoy the rest of the gig.

He posted about his impressive and original idea to blag his way into the VIP area on Facebook, where it has been liked hundreds of times.

Adam added: It was actually not what I expected in VIP, the band I was looking forward to seeing werent there because they were getting ready to play next, but there were all these photographers running around, trying to get the best angles, and a few running out to wait for them to come on stage, etc. It was hectic.

When I went back out to the crowd, past the bar that was in there, there were roped off seats, with more photographers, and people I can only assume were family or friends of the bands, so I just sat there and watched the band, close enough to see the time on their watches.

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Teen sneaks into a VIP section at a gig by changing band's ... - The Sun

This teenager got seriously creative to get a better view at a music concert.

Adam Boyd said hebluffed his way into the VIP area at the Albert Hall in Manchester, northern England, on Friday night after editing The SherlocksWikipedia page on his cell phone to say he was the lead singers cousin.

He then showed the switched-up entry to a security guard, who let him slide into the roped-off section without issue.

I couldnt believe that hed actually let me in, Boyd told The Huffington Post on Wednesday.I was expecting someone to drag me out and ban me from the venue. But no, I was given free access to all the VIP section.

Boyd shared images of his escapade to Facebook the following day, and the post is now going viral.

Some commenters have suggested Boyd exaggerated the incident, but he insisted it was 100 percent the truth. Mashable also noteshow his name was indeed added to the page at 8:28 p.m. Friday night.

Wikipedia

Boyd isnt the first person to pull such a stunt. Peking Duk superfan David Spargo did pretty much the same back in 2015 to get backstage.

And Boyd probably wont be the last, as he himself revealed how people were now contacting him to say they planned on repeating the trick elsewhere.

The teen did describethe amount of publicity his stunt had generated as pretty overwhelming, however.I only posted this with the intention of entertaining the usual 40 people that like my statuses and thing Im funny, he said. I could have not anticipated anything quite the scale of this.

Read more:
Teen Edits Band's Wikipedia Page To Bluff His Way Into VIP Section - Huffington Post

Mashable

Teen sneaks into band's VIP section by editing their Wikipedia page Mashable A teenager has shared a Facebook post explaining how he snuck into a band's VIP area by editing their Wikipedia page. A British teen edits Wikipedia page of band to get into concert ...New Zealand Herald This Teenager Edited Himself Into A Band's Wikipedia Page To Get VIP TreatmentEsquire UK Teen sneaks into a VIP section at a gig by changing band's ...The Sun JOE -theMusic -Crewe Chronicle all 7 news articles »

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Teen sneaks into band's VIP section by editing their Wikipedia page - Mashable

Analysis When you live in a glass house, is it wise to start a rock-throwing competition?

Wikipedians this week added greatly to the amusement of the internet after around 40 contributors loftily declared that the Daily Mail was not a reliable source for citations. Much public hilarity ensued for the reason that The Mail and Wikipedia are really far more alike than either would care to admit.

(Let's leave aside the complication that "The Mail" is really three things: two newspapers which have a highly antagonistic relationship the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday and a sensationalist website, which is a different beast entirely.)

Both the Mail and Wikipedia have noble ambitions. One wishes to make the world's information free, and the other vows to defend proud provincial values from the metropolitan elites, to speak truth to power, and so on. But in reality, both depend heavily for their traffic on showbiz trivia. When we last looked a month ago, 20 of the top 25 Wikipedia pages were entertainment pages, with Star Wars and Zsa Zsa Gabor-related entries snaffling 10. Today the picture is largely the same. The notorious publicity hound Zsa Zsa Gabor has fallen out of the top 25 to be replaced by... Milo Yiannopoulos. The Mail's "sidebar of shame" specialises in celebrity "breasts and buttocks", drowning out the newspaper's highbrow contributors.

Both can resemble a real chamber of horrors. Since the rise of medieval torture porn cult ISIS, no other newspaper website has covered their atrocities as generously as the Mail Online. Staff tell stories that when the terror group "has a good one coming up", it puts a call into the Mail proper. It seems as though every centimetre of celebrity cellulite, and every teacher-pupil relationship is enthusiastically reported. For its part, Wikipedia's exhaustive detailing of sexual practices including masturbation photos thoughtfully uploaded by contributors is a wonder of the age.

Both also rely on reusing other people's work. That is to say both Wikipedia and the Mail Online reduce the roles of researching and editing common to both traditions to a process, to be fulfilled by low-paid staff or, in Wikipedia's case, unpaid volunteers. You can think of both as giant copying machines (one of Wikipedia's principles is NOR: "No Original Research"). I speak from experience here, after an exhaustive investigation that took four years to assemble, check and complete was shamelessly plagiarised the very next day, in a 2,000-word ripoff. The journalist responsible emailed to say he was very sorry, and shortly afterwards, severed his links with the Mail. But to this day, the plagiarised version still doesn't contain a link to the original, and cites no other source.

Both are also vigorous political campaigners although only the Mail admits to be. Wikipedia now pays lobbyists, has an endowment fund, and took a highly visible and partisan role against digital property rights (in the SOPA protests) and against privacy rights (after the ECJ's so-called "Right to be Forgotten" ruling).

Both are what Media Studies profs would call "cultural signifiers" they stand for something bigger. Wikipedia is a synonym for "crowdsourced knowledge" while the Mail is a synonym for a whole stack of values. Equally, there's mileage from declaring that whatever one may be for, one is safely against the other. For example, declaring that you never use Wikipedia, or that you wouldn't wipe your arse with the Daily Mail is a vivid expression of virtue-signalling. (Simply saying "dayley-mayell" is enough to get you on a BBC Radio 4 comedy. Probably for life.)

With Jimmy Wales now on the board of the Guardian Media Group the Mail's arch enemy this has a political dimension.

But both also claim to take the moral high ground with reliability and here both come unstuck. As newspapers failed to devise new digital revenue models, they became more clickbait-driven, and took originality and reliability less seriously. But they also became increasingly dependent on Wikipedia, as this story from a decade ago demonstrated. After 20 years at the BBC, few obituary writers could resist including a fabrication inserted into Wikipedia by a prankster. The Guardian, Reuters, The Times and even the BBC itself copied and pasted the unlikely factoid into their obits.

The problem Wikipedia has created for itself this week is that the newspapers don't really care if they recycle Wikipedia factoids the demand for "free fast facts" is something that Wikipedia largely exists to fulfil. But by making a grab for the moral high ground, Wikipedia must now disentangle itself from the Daily Mail, which is going to be difficult. And it also invites the world to examine just how reliable Wikipedia is, which is harder still.

Let's take the first one first.

There are between 5,000 and 50,000 links to the Daily Mail's websites from Wikipedia. Why the difference? Well, one search (try it) gives you some idea of the external links, but doesn't distinguish between active reader-facing Wikipedia articles, and old pages, talk pages or project discussion pages like RFCs. It's an overestimate. Whereas this search returns the number of articles, roughly 4,500, with at least one Mail citation. But an article may have multiple citations to the Mail sites: Wikipedia's entry for Adele currently has four, so the citation count will certainly be higher than 4,500.

Secondly, and this is the irony that has provided such enjoyment, Wikipedia is an inexhaustible supply of duff information, from ropey micro-factoids that nobody spots, to ambitious and witty hoaxes such as the Brazilian aardvark, or the Bicholim conflict, which can lie uncorrected for years. Wikipedia "won" the online information wars by being fast and cheap, not by being reliable. If one is to deplore the Mail's personal attacks on public figures, it helps not to have BLPs (biographies of living persons) that carry a huge red warning sign over them.

Read more:
The Mail vs Wikipedia: They're more alike than they'd ever admit ... - The Register

Move Over, Wikipedia. Dictionaries Are Hot Again. New York Times In the hours after Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, was silenced by her Republican colleagues for impugning a fellow senator by reading aloud a letter Coretta Scott King had written that was critical of Jeff Sessions, Republican ... and more »

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Move Over, Wikipedia. Dictionaries Are Hot Again. - New York Times