The Art of Wikigroaning
If there is anything to be learned in this life, it's that there's
no such thing as a free lunch. This is true even if you're a bum and some
rich guy comes up one day and buys you lunch, because he'll probably expect
to hear some of your bum tales and then he'll go back to the office and
tell everyone about how he charmed a "quaint little bum," and before
you know it, the rich guy has stolen your bum tales and is passing them off as
his own. Then someone overhears that guy and passes the tales off as their own,
and so on, until one day your best homeless friend is telling you an
all-too-familiar story. Well no way, Chester, it was me who once chased Eddie
Murphy down an alley, not you.
Nowhere on the Internet does this free lunch logic hold
more true than at Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia anyone can edit. Sure,
it's monetarily free, but it costs you heaps in credibility and accuracy,
as well as the time spent combing over information for instances of "jason
is a faggit" and other assorted such delights hidden mid-paragraph here
and there. Not to mention the incredible amount of useless information that
nobody would ever need, as well as the self-important administrative body that
comes complete with the wildest God complex this side of Waco.
But wait, if it sounds like I'm hating on Wikipedia, I don't mean to
come off that way. I love Wikipedia. It's by far the most entertaining
open-source project to ever exist, and yes, I am counting LInux and all of the
LInux User Group online photo albums it is responsible for. You see, there are
games you can play with Wikipedia. Fun games that you can pass hours
upon hours with. I'm not talking about hiding a clue to the supposed
sexuality of your high school nemesis in the article about Lieutenant Worf. A
nondestructive Wikipedia game was invented last year by my good pals Dr. David
Thorpe and Street Cactus, and I have to say that it blows that pedestrian-ass
googlewhacking right out of the water.
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"Imagine a world in which
every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human
knowledge. That's what we're doing."
-Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder
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The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that
normal people might read. For example, the article called "Knight." Then,
find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to
a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we'll go with
"Jedi
Knight." Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two
articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the
greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created. Are
you looking yet? Get a good, long look. Yeah. Yeeaaah, we know, but that is
just the tip of the iceberg. (We're calling it Wikigroaning for a reason.)
The next step is to find your own article pair and share it with your friends,
who will usually look for their own pairs and you end up spending a good hour
or two in a groaning arms race. The game ends after that, usually without any
clear winners... but hey, it beats doing work.
We go Wikigroaning on the SA forums from time to time and feel
confident enough to share the fruits of our
latest outing with the public. We're pretty proud of some of these.
Enjoy!
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