Hatrack River Forum: New column: Wikipedia and The Madness of Crowds

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Posted by Chris Bridges (Member # 1138) on :

Wikipedia and The Madness of Crowds

Welcome to a new experiment in humor columning: the wikicolumn. This revolutionary approach to communal wackiness is based on the [trendy] [rumor-mongering] free online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows its articles to be edited by anyone in the world with results that are often very educational indeed, if not necessarily on the original topic.

Wikipedia was founded in [2002] [1969] [the age of the dinosaurs] 2001 by [Bill Gates] [Jayson Blair] Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, who wanted to produce a vibrant, ever-growing encyclopedia that could expand and autocorrect itself by allowing anyone reading an article to [make changes] [replace it with pig latin] edit as they see fit. This, he [hypotheseized] [hypotheseed] [hypothosoosed] guessed would result in accurate and relevant articles because Jimbo didn't understand people very well. Wikipedia is named after the Hawaiian word "wiki," which means literally "ha ha, wait 'til someone reads this."

There are several advantages to this format, notably the speed at which new events are updated -- celebrity deaths are often posted here before the television news finds out and sometimes even before the first souvenir hospital chart shows up at eBay -- and the breadth of the coverage. Experts both professional and amateur have contributed to Wikipedia, and if you know something about something your words can also become part of the permanent record of mankind's accumulated knowledge, at least until some jerk comes along and deletes it all.

Posted by Dr Strangelove (Member # 8331) on :

Hehe ... Hilarious, as usual. So now would be a bad time to tell my economics professor I used Wikipedia as my primary resource?

Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :

Heh!

I've written an "article" about Wikipedia for a college newspaper, only the focus of mine was how Wikipedia displayed the inventiveness of the human mind. It's a good thing to write about...

Posted by starLisa (Member # 8384) on :

Really? Jimbo Wales created Wikipedia? I remember him from alt.philosophy.objectivism, like 10 years ago.

Posted by xnera (Member # 187) on :

*snerks mightily* LOVED this column.

But I wanted to point out that your link to Wikipedia in the first paragraph is broken. Looks like maybe the http:// wasn't included?

Posted by Chris Bridges (Member # 1138) on :

And you didn't fix it? [Smile]

It's fixed, thanks.

Posted by xnera (Member # 187) on :

I was in a rush and didn't have time to sign in to my Chrisipedia account.