I agree. If I were setting up an experiment like this, I'd have instrumented the hell out of it to see all actions taken in real time, and have a team of folks watching it. This team would have seen the anomalous GET requests to a German wiki and taken action (e.g. halt the system to investigate and decide whether to abort).

In fact, that feels so obvious it's ridiculous it needs to be said. It's table stakes. When do you run a production system without monitoring and a team on-call?

It's hard to imagine another field in which this reckless behavior would be tolerated.