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Amusing Wikipedia Stuff [split topic]

Started by dr_christian_troy, July 25, 2010, 11:46:13 AM

Previous topic - Next topic

Ferris

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on May 23, 2019, 08:29:52 PM
That Beardsley image is really funny, though. It's just a bit of harmless whimsy.

Anyway, it's been taken down again. What a boring world we live in, eh Peter?

Yer a good lad, Peter.

And/or

N'yalright, Bob - I'm still home from wurk cos of the trouble with the foreign lads, y'know.

hillbillyholiday

The North Face have been photoshopping their products into images on Wiki articles.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/29/wikipedia_north_face/ etc.

Started off quite sly...



...but they got a wee bit carried away...





Almost like they wanted to get caught!

kalowski

Top Cat
Writing about the cat Fancy
QuoteIn the film, which features robots as a plot device, he is able to disguise himself as a feminine robot. His voice is a bit narrower and more "fancy" than in the TV series. He also has a girlfriend, with whom he has an uneasy relationship. Matthew Piazzi voices him in the movie.

Icehaven

Someone got bored halfway through doing their homework.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camel

Edit; Well that changed quickly. The Habitat and Adaptation section previously read ''Habitat and Adaptation - Kaitley Stanley is a science beast.''

Ferris


imitationleather


Camp Tramp

This guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Foglesong

If you look at the Talk page, you'll notice that there is a war going on between Wiki editors, vandals and probably Foglesong himself.


a duncandisorderly

Quote from: Camp Tramp on June 16, 2019, 10:55:03 PM
This guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Foglesong

If you look at the Talk page, you'll notice that there is a war going on between Wiki editors, vandals and probably Foglesong himself.

I almost always go straight to the talk page behind an article to see who's being proprietorial & how big the dog is that they have in the race. if there are experts slugging it out, that's great, but sometimes it's just the wikipedia nazis trying to make a point about verifiability being more important than having the good faith say-so of someone that everyone there knows is the expert in the field.
don't get me started.
the talk page that used to be behind the article on 'bass guitars' (& even me writing it like that would've set them off) was a good one.

a duncandisorderly

this, from the page on nuclear weapon design (it's for work, OK?) tickled-

"Holding an exploding bomb together is the greatest challenge of fission weapon design."

a duncandisorderly

"The device continued working until December 1996, when it was switched off and scrapped. This was done discreetly to avoid publicity."

"you're terminated, motherfucker"

grassbath

This opening paragraph raised a bleak laugh.

QuoteDavid Hamilton (15 April 1933 – 25 November 2016) was a British photographer and film director best known for his photography of young women and girls, mostly in the nude.[1] His signature soft focus style was called the "Hamilton Blur", which was erroneously thought to be achieved by smearing Vaseline on the lens of his camera. It was not created that way.


hillbillyholiday

Competition time!

If someone can get an article wholly generated by Talk to Transformer to stick on Wikipedia for a whole month, minimum of 5,000 words, fake quotes, dubious facts, iffy references, basically all of it nonsense, then I'll donate a hundred quid to the charity of their choosing.

First to prove it wins.


For more details see: Wikipediocracy :: Talk to Transformer



I reserve the right to change the rules at any time and for any reason. Don't worry, money will be donated whatever happens.

An tSaoi

Quote from: Caligula_(film)
Cast

  • Malcolm McDowell as Caligula
  • Teresa Ann Savoy as Drusilla
  • Helen Mirren as Caesonia
  • Guido Mannari as Macro
  • Patrick Allen as Macro (English dub voice) (uncredited)
  • John Gielgud as Nerva
  • Peter O'Toole as Tiberius
  • Giancarlo Badessi as Claudius
  • John Steiner as Longinus
  • Paolo Bonacelli as Cassius Chaerea
  • Joss Ackland as Cassius Chaerea (English dub voice)
  • Leopoldo Trieste as Charicles
  • Adriana Asti as Ennia
  • Mirella Dangelo as Livia
  • Richard Parets as Mnester
  • Donato Placido as Proculus
  • Osiride Pevarello as Giant
  • Anneka Di Lorenzo as Messalina
  • Lori Wagner as Agrippina
  • Bruno Brive as Gemellus
  • Paula Mitchell as Subura Singer
  • Davide as Caligula's horse (uncredited)

That last one had me in stitches, because it doesn't seem like a joke. I'm sure it's true, but it reads like a punchline.

It means that there is someone out there who:
1) happens to know the name of the horse "actor" who played Caligula's horse,
2) is offended that he was left off the end credits and wants to give him his due,
3) has gone to the trouble of editing Wikipedia to right this wrong, and
4) has neglected to include the real name of Caligula's actual horse (Incitatus)

It's the perfect storm of low-key unintentional Wikipedia comedy. It's had me googling "Davide famous horse", "horse actor Davide", "Caligula Davide horse" just to see if the frigger was actually famous.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8564562/

1 credit. Perfect.

a duncandisorderly

Quote from: An tSaoi on July 07, 2019, 10:22:56 PM
That last one had me in stitches, because it doesn't seem like a joke. I'm sure it's true, but it reads like a punchline.

It means that there is someone out there who:
1) happens to know the name of the horse "actor" who played Caligula's horse,
2) is offended that he was left off the end credits and wants to give him his due,
3) has gone to the trouble of editing Wikipedia to right this wrong, and
4) has neglected to include the real name of Caligula's actual horse (Incitatus)

It's the perfect storm of low-key unintentional Wikipedia comedy. It's had me googling "Davide famous horse", "horse actor Davide", "Caligula Davide horse" just to see if the frigger was actually famous.

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8564562/

1 credit. Perfect.

I got into a dispute on here a few months ago about wikipedia's policy of "we don't care if it's true or not, it just has to be independently verifiable", which I think is absolutely stupid; this is a classic example of that, I suspect, where the two are fed off each other. wikipedia contributors aren't supposed t use IMDb as a source, but they do, & naturally IMDb's own contributors do their fact-checking using wikipedia. no-one bothers asking the people who were actually there or know about something, because that is called 'original research' & it's banned.

Ambient Sheep

Yup.  There was a classic one a few years ago where someone who was actually the subject of an article was telling them they had something wrong but, because all of the articles -- copying a lie from one to another -- said otherwise, they just told him he'd remembered it wrong and they wouldn't change it.

popcorn

#976
Quote from: a duncandisorderly on July 08, 2019, 03:14:54 AM
I got into a dispute on here a few months ago about wikipedia's policy of "we don't care if it's true or not, it just has to be independently verifiable", which I think is absolutely stupid; this is a classic example of that, I suspect, where the two are fed off each other. wikipedia contributors aren't supposed t use IMDb as a source, but they do, & naturally IMDb's own contributors do their fact-checking using wikipedia. no-one bothers asking the people who were actually there or know about something, because that is called 'original research' & it's banned.

You're still wrong about this.

The cycle you and Ambient Sheep describe (citogenesis) is real and produces real-world problems. There's even a Wikipedia article that lists cases, if anyone's interested.

But to present this as if it therefore makes Wikipedia somehow fundamentally broken is completely wrong. Wikipedia is still, on the whole, very accurate when compared to other sources (including other "professional" encyclopaedias), and there's a well cited Wikipedia article about that too.

Your alternative, "bothering to ask the people who were actually there or know about something", would only work if there were some good way to know these people were generally reliable. Which is the whole point of verifiability.

Inviting anyone who claimed "to be there" to march in and rewrite facts based on their own personal expertise would undo the entire project. Why would anyone believe them? Why should they? What would the Donald Trump article look like? It would produce a far less readable, useful and above all less accurate encyclopaedia.

Your frustrations with Wikipedia sound like the Gell-Mann amnesia effect. Which is to say that seeing incorrect information about a topic you're an expert on is of course annoying, but not exclusive to Wikipedia - and in fact Wikipedia offers more tools to repair it than, well, any other reliable source of information. You just have to play by the rules, and the rules, to use a wanker's phrase, are there for a reason.

I would be genuinely interested in knowing about which falsehoods you've encountered on Wikipedia and can't find sources to correct. Completely happy to help. Just PM me.

popcorn

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on July 08, 2019, 04:18:53 AM
Yup.  There was a classic one a few years ago where someone who was actually the subject of an article was telling them they had something wrong but, because all of the articles -- copying a lie from one to another -- said otherwise, they just told him he'd remembered it wrong and they wouldn't change it.

I would be interested in knowing what this was about. There are procedures in place for correcting articles about yourself.

Ambient Sheep

Quote from: popcorn on July 08, 2019, 08:35:51 AM
I would be interested in knowing what this was about. There are procedures in place for correcting articles about yourself.

Sadly I can no longer remember (otherwise I would have said who it was).  It was quite a long time ago now though and I have a vague memory that they changed their policy at least in part because of it.  Apologies for being so vague.


Quote from: popcorn on July 08, 2019, 07:37:04 AMI would be genuinely interested in knowing about which falsehoods you've encountered on Wikipedia and can't find sources to correct. Completely happy to help. Just PM me.

I'll bear that in mind -- if I may, given that it wasn't actually addressed to me -- next time I see one.

It does happen a lot more rarely these days... but a few years ago it was regularly driving me crazy, especially when I realised there was no way of proving what I knew, 100% (not even 99%), to be wrong.

Again, annoyingly, my memory is so shot to pieces with stress-induced cortisol that I can't think of any right now.  Hopefully, when I next meet one, I'll remember this offer!

hillbillyholiday

Quote from: popcorn
You're still wrong about this.

But to present this as if it therefore makes Wikipedia somehow fundamentally broken is completely wrong. Wikipedia is still, on the whole, very accurate when compared to other sources (including other "professional" encyclopaedias), and there's a well cited Wikipedia article about that too.

I would be genuinely interested in knowing about which falsehoods you've encountered on Wikipedia and can't find sources to correct. Completely happy to help. Just PM me.

No you are both wrong and naive; there haven't been any decent studies on the reliability of WP.
Your post is actually a perfect demonstration of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Wikimedia Foundation is one the most inept companies to have ever run a major website.

The content is, on the whole, absolute garbage. Self-respecting experts who encountered Wikipedia's Byzantine laws and Kafkaesque processes turned away in disgust ... well over a decade ago.

For better or worse, I was once one of their most prominent editors (google it), and it's hardly a badge I wear with pride.

I advise anyone wishing to understand the Ways of the Wiki to register an account at http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/ and have a good old rootle around the archives.


NoSleep

True... if you know a subject well, you'll notice the predominance of received wisdom over knowledge or history. And you can tell when somebody's idea of research means reading up on wiki.

Ferris

Quote from: NoSleep on July 09, 2019, 09:54:04 AM
True... if you know a subject well, you'll notice the predominance of received wisdom over knowledge or history. And you can tell when somebody's idea of research means reading up on wiki.

I wrote almost the exact same comment earlier, then deleted it because it was getting overlong and not making the point I wanted. Kudos!

If you know more than your average on a certain topic, you do start to notice people's opinions being presented as fact and occasionally see things that are flat out wrong.

It's only on the more esoteric topics though. Most of the time, it's great. Even on niche articles it is mostly fine, though depending on your niche YMMV

hillbillyholiday

QuoteKozierok's First Law : "The apparent accuracy of a Wikipedia article is inversely proportional to the depth of the reader's knowledge of the topic"

Some interesting articles...

Breast-shaped hill : Pretty much a list of hills that look a bit like tits. Unfortunately Wikipedia lacks any corresponding "penis-shaped" articles, I checked.

Diphallia : "Don't say we didn't warn you! Oh wait, we didn't..."

Mariko Aoki phenomenon :  A Japanese expression referring to "an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores" with over 140 references. The contents box alone is a thing of wonder.

marquis_de_sad

Quote from: hillbillyholiday on July 09, 2019, 05:40:08 PM
Mariko Aoki phenomenon :  A Japanese expression referring to "an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores" with over 140 references. The contents box alone is a thing of wonder.

It's way too long but... I don't really see your problem with it. It was a cultural phenomenon in Japan. Does the fact that there's a Slenderman article annoy you?

Ambient Sheep

Where does he say, or even imply, it's annoying him?

popcorn

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on July 08, 2019, 03:14:31 PM
I'll bear that in mind -- if I may, given that it wasn't actually addressed to me -- next time I see one.

It does happen a lot more rarely these days... but a few years ago it was regularly driving me crazy, especially when I realised there was no way of proving what I knew, 100% (not even 99%), to be wrong.

Again, annoyingly, my memory is so shot to pieces with stress-induced cortisol that I can't think of any right now.  Hopefully, when I next meet one, I'll remember this offer!

Please do, the offer is open any time!

popcorn

Quote from: hillbillyholiday on July 08, 2019, 10:14:51 PM


Oh fucking hell, Wikipedia drama. No thanks.

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on July 09, 2019, 01:49:53 PM
I wrote almost the exact same comment earlier, then deleted it because it was getting overlong and not making the point I wanted. Kudos!

I also said this. >:(

But I buried it in a mysterious link.

Quote from: popcorn on July 08, 2019, 07:37:04 AM
Gell-Mann amnesia effect.



Ferris

Quote from: popcorn on July 10, 2019, 03:39:46 AM
I also said this. >:(

But I buried it in a mysterious link.

I was skipping the links as untrustworthy - you can't believe anything you read on Wikipedia.

marquis_de_sad

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on July 10, 2019, 01:24:55 AM
Where does he say, or even imply, it's annoying him?

I don't know if you're objecting to my use of the word "annoying", but from the context of the conversation it's clear these aren't being held up as good articles.

An tSaoi

They're being held up as amusing articles.

The fact that the Japanese have a term for "an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores" is amusing.