On Why Wikipedia Is Not A Reliable Source (When Writing A University Essay)

It may surprise you, Internet folks (though I must admit that if it does, then I myself shall be quite surprised in turn) to learn that a portion of my friends (and, on occasion, myself) are what I like to call "Internet Deviants." Not, however, in a 4-chan, /b/tard, moronic kind of way, mind you (although some of them are getting there - you know who you are...) but more in a...petty vandalism of areas of public interest that have never done anything to harm us in any way, shape, or form, kind of way. We are, if you will, a special form of Internet guerrilla artist.

It's A Gorilla...Um...I'll Go Away Now...

Indeed, and yes, Internet friends, the web is our canvas, and our media are merely words and images, videos and sounds. Our brush is a WYSIWYG editor, and our paints a well placed piece of text. Okay, slightly dramatic, I know, but please - have you met me (not necessarily in a literal sense, but...well...you should have a good grasp of me as a person by this stage, right?) In short, though, I suppose you could just say that we like defacing free-to-edit websites with interesting content. Material that will amuse people for the short time it is up there (I mean, it shouldn't be up there too long, it's peer reviewed for goodness' sake.)

Well...okay...we would be Internet vandals, and our canvas would be the great repository of all human knowledge, were it not for two major stumbling blocks that we hit time and time again. Issue the first is that we are just so lazy, to the point that thinking up the ideas and having our laugh is most often the point at which we go "Yeah...I'll do that later..." Issue the second is that, by the time we have actually gotten over how funny we think the idea is...well...we kinda tend to think that it's lame. I mean, sure, changing all references to Tori Spelling so that she becomes that seahorse from Drawn Together may seem like an amusing way to spend your afternoon at first, but come on - do you have that much time and follow through?

Why They Dissin' On Tori? She Knows What She Did...

And so, and alas, dear readers, we tend to be left with thoughts of adventures that could have been. Still, of the few times that we actually have defaced a Wikipedia entry two awesome things came from it. As the story goes (and so shall you, too, soon know) I was explaining to Spud about some of the plants that are in the belladonna family, and just how toxic (when consumed correctly) deadly nightshade actually is. To emphasise this point, Alydd quickly jumped on Wikipedia and changed the article's description to "deadly deadly ever-so deadly nightshade" - a change which was actually up there for (what I imagine is) quite some time. The only real benefit of this, besides our amusement, is just how much it annoyed our friend FacelessJ, who is like the Batman of Wikipedia. It's a fair city - and he is there to defend it...

Huzzah For Pointless Captions!

The moral of this story is that, on "International Pretend To Be A Time-Traveller" day, I plan on going onto Wikipedia and editing a bunch of articles about future events to seem like they have occurred in the past. When asked for sources, I shall give only "I'm from the future - I was there" and I shall expect everybody to believe me. Well, okay, the second part of that logic is actually how Wikipedia works. Also, I know I'm just too full of apathy to really give this a go when the day comes around, but oh how fun pretending I could be bothered is...