I have a little side project which might mesh well with some Dopers’ appreciation of absurdity.
We’re all familiar with Wikipedia, and how its greatest strength is also its greatest weakness - anybody can edit it. While most contributors are constructive, there are inevitably immature folks who like to sneak less-than-serious facts into articles. These eventually get corrected, but the original edits are all preserved for posterity in each article’s history.
What I’ve done is to comb through the histories of particular articles, pick out the most ridiculous edits, and weave them together into short narratives, complete with links. Each Wednesday I post a new one to my blog. This week’s entry is Pepsi: A Vandal’s History, in which we learn of little-known variants such as Pepsi Befouler, and ill-conceived slogans like “Delicious and Painful” and “Pepsi’s got your taste for death.”
My question to the Teeming Millions is this: would you buy a book of these if one were compiled? Is it an idea which merits a foray into the publishing world? Or should it remain tucked away in a dark corner of the Internet?
I’ve not linked to the blog’s main page, as many of the articles contain NSFW language. I also don’t have ads turned on, so I’m not posting this in Marketplace. The project is currently in a non-commercial stage which I think is safely characterized as both Mundane and Pointless.
Is that legal? I am completely unfamilar with Wikipedia’s copyright policy, but I would guess that lifting content from their site and publishing it for profit would be plagerism, copyright infringement or both.
To answer the question at hand, I don’t know. That type book would be an impulse buy for me, so it would really depend on my mood when I ran across it. Might be fun to have around just to show people who use Wikianything as a primary source of information, but not something I would necessarily seek out.
It falls into a grey area which would require consultation with a lawyer before I were to actively pursue publication. For the most part I’m not reproducing large amounts of Wikipedia content verbatim, but am paraphrasing and providing links to old revisions which are no longer present in the main part of the work.
Wikipedia’s content is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. A book like the one I’m considering might have to be released under the same license, which would limit its commercial prospects, but I’m not sure.
-the page for Louis Slotin, a nuclear scientist who received an acute and fatal dose of ionizing radiation during the Manhattan Project. For a short time his picture was replaced with that of Lou Ferrigno in full Incredible Hulk costume.
-the page for optical mouse. At one point someone had done a find/replace, substituting “dildo” for mouse, so that the entire page was about optical dildo technology.
If there were enough of these sorts of funny pages to put in a published book, yeah, I’d consider buying it.
Hehe. It’s amazing what a little radiation will do. Now I kind of want to see John Cusack in Hulk makeup. He’s a little skinny but I bet he’d find a way to pull it off.
Enough people were doing it that a lot of pictures (especially anatomical ones) are now protected so that they have to be explicitly authorized for use in particular articles.
It’s a great idea for a book. Whether or not I’d buy it depends on the overall quality of writing, and the diversity and cleverness of the included vandalizations. (In other words, it should be more than just examples of search-and-replace with naughty words. Those can be funny, and examples can be given, but they should not make up a significant portion of the book.)
BlackKnight, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to take a look at any of the linked articles, but I’d be interested to hear if they meet the criteria you mentioned.
Overall I’ve found a pretty wide variety of nonproductive edits. They range from simple word replacements, or insertions of rude ones, to long rambling monologues. I’ve done my best to weed out the boring ones, like kids trying to get their classmates in trouble, or blanking the page and putting in “____ rules!” or “____ sucks!”
