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Strangest things you have read on wikipedia

H

hbk48942

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 15, 2015
17
0
watching Mock the Week and Russell Howard said someone put on wikipedia about him that he got thrown out of a zoo for punching a monkey which he said didnt happen.

so was just wondering what are the strangest /most untrue things you have read on wikipedia?
 
This kills me for some reason!! The look on the Emu's face, the hilarious stats, plus look at the result :eek:

tumblr_lzhghpk8hr1qdxx9xo1_500.png


This was a bit edited though to add comic relief, here's the actual Wikipedia page

Emu War
 
The part about "coverage of topics and systemic bias" in Wikipedia’s description of itself:

link - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia#Coverage_of_topics_and_systemic_bias

Not so much strange as a little surprising here and there, yet unsurprising in other ways.

The pie chart on percentage of articles by category isn’t especially strange but the stats from the Carnegie / Palo Alto study about the category distribution and growth from 2006 to 2008 is a little weird, with technology dropping 6% while natural and physical sciences went up by 213%. Considering that the editors still probably are biased towards young, male, educated, having enough time to edit, etc., you’d think the tech stuff would have grown. Possibly there were rethinks on category, or deletions for some tech material having been put in that was later considered more dictionary-like than encylopedic. Not surprising that arts and culture category was already up around 30% even back in 2008. It would be interesting to have newer figures along lines of that study.
 
My son's friend edited the wikipedia for their school- making himself the principal. It stayed there for three weeks before it was changed back.
 
waynerbbx said:
My son's friend edited the wikipedia for their school- making himself the principal. It stayed there for three weeks before it was changed back.
Click to expand...

LOL... hope the kid enjoyed it while it lasted. Back in the day one pranked the principal by pouring a hundred bags of marbles onto the floor of his office, stuff like that. Messing w/ Wiki would seem a simpler if usually pretty temporary alternative.

The section on vandalism of Wiki articles said something about it might take "a few minutes" to repair damage but depending on what it was, and availability of reviewers and administrators, could also take much longer. Even when I read that, I was thinking that it's not necessarily about how much damage, it's whether it's something relatively inconspicuous or a real screamer.

It's certainly wiser to use this resource for only the most basic sense of something about which you're searching for info. I most often use it to get some external links from citations that I feel I can put at least some trust in. Then I use citations from that information to go deeper if I need more info. Half the time I jsut want to know something like who the ruler of some country was at some point in time. Stuff that's checkable elsewhere....

It's not that I don't appreciate the existence of Wikipedia, I just acknowledge, as do the Wikipedia founders, that the openness does create potential for some trust issues. By that I'm not patting on the back the editors of other encyclopedias that sometimes offer such sanitized versions of history that you think they were written for The Onion. I applaud Wikipedia for trying to thread a path to knowledge that has to run through minefilelds like attempts at censorship or vandalism, while presenting sometimes controversial material in ways that let people illuminate multiple facets of the information. It's admirable for effort no matter how far from perfect or passing strange are the results.
 
I just prefer to not go to *that* weird side of Wikipedia...just like on YouTube.
 
I was reading about the war between the US and Mexico, I think it was, and someone had edited the article about Santa Ana to make it all about some prize rooster.

It was genuinely hilarious, and within a few minutes I reloaded the page and it was gone.
 
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