The entry begins:
I love it when stuff like this happens. What else have you seen on Wikipedia that’s made you laugh?
I don’t find vandalism of that kind funny. I just fixed one bit of vandalism there (reverting the population from about 42 million to about 42 thousand).
It still says 42 million. When I saw that I went :dubious: .
I’ve fixed that too – the population figure is in the article 3 times.
I suspect there’s still some rubbish in the “Culture” and “Notable Residents” sections, which you’d need some local knowledge to fix.
I prefer “vandalism” which is technically true. Spot the subtle jibe at an unpopular politician in the opening paragraph of this entry.
Yes – that’s fine by me, since in the world of NSW ALP politics, being a country member is high praise.
But I use Wikipedia a lot at work, and it would slow me down a lot if I had to check for vandalism. Fortunately, the subject areas which I use most aren’t popular areas for the ignorant children who mess up Wikipedia.
That’s not vandalism, it’s culture. And since I’ve met him, I’d hardly forget.
I used it once to check some information on a town near me and it said something like “has the largest population of dwarves in the world.” I deleted that, but it may be back.
I was looking at Henry VIII’s page one time and someone had given him a son with Katharine Parr. The fictitious son had his own page, too, with a title and a list of descendants. From the history it looks like Henry’s page gets vandalized a lot.
I’ll confess I laughed at some of these recurring themes in Mallard Fillmore
Well, reading the “talk” page on that link is enough to dispel whatever illusions I might have had that the articles in Wikipedia are all the result of knowledgeable, well-intentioned, cool-headed people, anyway. Fortunately, the overall quality of WP is still decent enough.
RR
Went to the Star Wars page the other day and the opening line was Star Farts is a movie…
Checked out Bobby Robson, clicked on his picture, and got a huge picture of a penis.
There’s a perpetual war on the **Recursion **page. People keep adding links to See Also : Recursion.
Other people keep removing it.
Did anyone else see the Super Bowl penis? I looked up Super Bowl XLII on Wikipedia just before kickoff, and was surprised to see the page dominated by a color photograph of a small flaccid penis. The picture remained there for several minutes.
At one time, Wikipedia kept some of its funniest vandalisms in an archive called “Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense”. This archive of some of it contains my favorite Wikipedia vandalism of all time: the story of Strings McPickens, the heroic banjo player.
And some interesting Deleted Article titles.
This is making me laugh and laugh and laugh. (See also: Laughing, by MsWhatsit.)
Denshaw, a small village in northern England, reportedly suffered from a severe tapeworm outbreak, is filled with obese locals who indulge in sheep throwing, and has a high level of malnourishment due to sunlight being blocked by the hills for most of the day.
My absolute favorite discovery of wikipedia vandalism of all time:
For whatever reason, I wanted to wiki Steve Martin.
Here’s an approximation of what I got:
It took me a sec, but then I roared with laughter. Great redirect.
It’s long fixed, but that one I enjoyed.
The topic line said “funny.”
The Recursion article is much more like it!
ETA: Oh, and so is the Atlantic Records vandalisms on Weird Al’s behalf. 