Fun With Wikipedia

We mentioned Wikipedia in class, and it reminded me of a couple of great ways in which Wikipedia has been made into a weird pop culture object.

First is the weird bizarre topic of Wikigroaning. First discovered by myself on Something Awful.com (WARNING: Don't surf the site if you are at work, it is some risque stuff), which is itself something I will have to talk about later, it's a somewhat popular game, referenced briefly on the Colbert Report at least once, and even in the Wall Street Journal, but Wikigroaning is simply the practice of looking at a 'respectable' scholarly article like, as referenced in the Journal, Prime numbers, or on the Something Awful page, Knights. Then you compare it with a pop culture equivalent, such as Optimus Prime, or Jedi Knights. After looking at this, examine the size of the two articles, the amount of information present, the amount of citation, etc. It's a fascinating look at how Wikipedia, even with its lofty goals, has become this bizarre object of pop culture. For every constitution, there is a lightsaber combat, and one is longer than the other.

And then, a pop culture movement that ties in very well with the discussion on wiki-vandalism we talked about is the website http://www.everytopicintheuniverseexceptchickens.com/ Started by Ryan north, writer of http://www.qwantz.com/ (another topic to discuss!), Every topic in the universe except for chickens was a proposal for how to fix the problem of wikipedia vandalism forever by having all the vandals attack one article so every other article would be completely correct. That article, North reasoned, is Chickens because no human being will ever need to know about the chicken in any greater capacity than they already do. The chickens article was eventually locked because of vandalism. Another example of how Wikipedia has become as much a part of pop culture as anything else.