Dumb Shit on Wikipedia

[Cosmos]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars
There’s gold in these mines, copypasted the weirdest ones below:

2006 Hurricane Season: Should a tropical cyclone that formed on December 30, 2005 and lasted until January 6, 2006 (Tropical Storm Zeta) be placed in the 2006 Atlantic hurricane season article? The debate eventually explores the terms of hurricane season, how long it lasts, why hurricane followers are so tied to the concept of a hurricane season, and even whether a stapler moved from one desk to another is considered to be on the other desk. It was a truly stunning debate that spanned seven months, drew comparisons to civil unions and gay marriage, and could restart at any moment.

Caesar Salad: Was this tasty salad invented in Mexico in 1924, or in ancient Rome? Is it named after Caesar Cardini or Julius Caesar? Is it spelled Caesar, Cesar, or Cesare? If you add tomatoes is it still a Caesar or is it something called a "Letchworth salad"? A slow motion edit war stretching out over a year two years is surely the best way to find out!

Clover (creature): The creature from the movie Cloverfield was never explicitly named in the movie, or was it? Is "Cloverfield" the name of the military casefile, or the monster, or both? Some reporter referred to the creature itself as "Cloverfield" so let's go with "Cloverfield (creature)" Wait, shouldn't we follow suit with Frankenstein and call it "The Cloverfield creature"? Or wait, maybe it should just be "Cloverfield creature"; maybe it should be "Cloverfield (monster)"? No, we can't do that, it shows bias and isn't NPOV. Rumor has it that the production staff just called it "Clover", but that's just a nickname, it doesn't count, does it? No matter, we can't use that until we find a source confirming that they call it Clover....OK, now we have one. How's about we skirt all naming conventions and call it "The Monster/Clover (creature)" to make everyone happy. Nah, that's no good, back to "Clover (creature)". But wait, that's still not the true name of the creature, so we shouldn't use that. Followed by and interspersed with a cavalcade of "Alright how about we just compromise and set it back to <editor's favorite name>." It's extremely important that an article on a fictional topic which only narrowly escaped AfD be properly named. Rather amusingly, considering how much edit warring there was/is on the page, it's been awarded "Good Article" status

Death Star: Is it 120 km (75 mi) or 160 km (99 mi) in diameter? Even 900 km (560 mi)? How shall they word that? Is the hyperdrive class 3 or 4? Who really cares? George Lucas apparently doesn't. Sure, HE's not the one stuck with the life-or-death decision of picking the right caliber torpedo to blow it up. But to a Rebel pilot, it's very important! This is war, after all.

Eastern Gray Squirrel: Native species in North America where the dominant spelling is gray. Invasive species in the United Kingdom where they call it grey. Nationalistic tempers simmer for two years in slow and remorseless edit war after a content request for comment supposedly settles the issue in favor (favour) of the Americans. Dissatisfied Brits continually tiptoe back, changing a to e, without ever actually proposing a title change for the article.

Futurama: Was protagonist Fry cryonically frozen or cryogenically frozen (or even crygenically frozen)? Why don't we just say he was frozen? Seeing as it has been changed nearly daily since the creation of the article (occasionally accompanied by a bit of text on the talk page uncovering some new evidence gleaned from an audio commentary), we may never know...

Grand Thief Auto IV: Is Niko Bellic (the main character) Serbian, Slovak, Bosnian, Croatian, Russian, or from some unnamed Eastern European country? Normally reliable sources do not agree on the matter (with those written pre-launch suggesting the character is Russian, and post-launch Serbian or Croatian), and the actual game itself is just ambiguous enough about the subject to create dissent (and of course this is a part of the world where nationalist feelings run high, see Balkanization - even the order that Croatia and Serbia are listed also offends some.). At one point, the article contained five consecutive citations, repeated each of the three times the character's nationality is mentioned, totalling a whopping fifteen citation numbers throughout the article to justify the purported nationality of a fictional video game character. The article reached eventual consensus on the nationality issue (unknown) and the name of the war (an unknown war in Eastern Europe) based on the author(s) having not revealed the information about the character. Despite it now being seven years since the game's release, and despite edit notices and warning text in the article body and an FAQ on the talk page, the subject still receives many edits a year, and the subject is repeatedly raised on the article talk page.

Kanto (Pokemon): A huge discussion broke out regarding the notability of a particular truck appearing in some iterations of the Pokémon series and whether the accompanying images fell under fair use. The article's talk page ballooned over ten times from 12,000 bytes to 140,000 bytes and spilled over onto several users' talk pages.

List of fictional ducks: You read that right; edit warring over nonexistent waterfowl. Page protections, admin interventions, accusations of vandalism and sockpuppetry fly like...well, like things that fly, anyway.

Lucky Charms: A long-running, slow-motion edit war between anonymous users seeks to address the big issue: Are they or aren't they sold in Ireland?

My Little Pony: Is Baby Cuddles blue or green? Is Fizzy blue or green? Editors resorted to uploading photos of their own ponies to debate the point, possibly indicating 10 year old girls are more computer savvy than ever...

Raven Riley: Is this porn star Italian? Native American? Puerto Rican? Cypriot? Does she have Indian blood? Who cares? But make sure that, when you change it, you don't even think about citing any source; please feel free to insult whoever put in the previous ethnicity. Anonymous editors: be sure to insert multitudes of her different "real names," with no sourcing whatsoever.

Stegosaurs in popular culture: Two admins disagree over the inclusion of a paragraph mentioning several Stego-like cartoon characters. The dispute eventually dissolves into slow wheel-warring over several days, with a careful attention to the magic number, leaving other users scratching their head as they attempt to understand what makes that particular paragraph such an obvious target for dispute.

Talk: Tyrannosaurus: Perhaps one of the most truly bizzare edit wars ever, this was a short but tense edit war where an anonymous user apparently argued with themselves over whether Tyrannosaurus rex was a predator or a scavenger. It later turned out that it happened to be two anonymous users who shared the same IP address.

This is autism in its purest form.

This is my favorite one:

My Little Pony: Is Baby Cuddles blue or green? Is Fizzy blue or green? Editors resorted to uploading photos of their own ponies to debate the point, possibly indicating 10 year old girls are more computer savvy than ever...

I love how the writer assumes that the editors were "10 year old girls" and not manchildren.

 

[AnOminous]

I love how the writer assumes that the editors were "10 year old girls" and not manchildren.

Well, to be fair, pre-G4 ponies are probably owned by middle aged women.

 

[Linako 2.0]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death

 

[The Great Chandler]

Wikipedia is basically an excuse to make explicit content without reprucussion. "Son, what is this shit? Looking at fucky porn?"

 

[Type 99 light machine gun]

A spergout of heroic proportions has been going down on the page on Marco Polo since February. It apparently got messy enough that both a request for page protection and a third-party moderator have been deemed necessary to quell the fires, which apparently revolve around whether or not it's appropriate to be citing an article not written in English.

 

[millais]

There's no photos of Kim Jong-un on his Wikipedia page because there are no free-licensed photos of him available anywhere and the editors are too poor to buy the license and/or fly to North Korea and take their own photos of Mr. Kim. So their solution is to use a drawing of Kim instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Jong-un
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Kim_Jong-un

 

[CervixHammer]

I note they still have that fucking artist who draws all the gross shit in Wikipedia sex articles. His name is "seedfeeder." He is a fucking lolcow.

that illustration for a facial, though.

 

[vertexwindi]

that illustration for a facial, though.

They used to have a different illustration

 

[CervixHammer]

They used to have a different illustration

they still have that one further down in the article. they also have four images for missionary position, including gay and lesbian.

seedfeeder is very dedicated to his craft.

 

[autisticdragonkin]

A spergout of heroic proportions has been going down on the page on Marco Polo since February. It apparently got messy enough that both a request for page protection and a third-party moderator have been deemed necessary to quell the fires, which apparently revolve around whether or not it's appropriate to be citing an article not written in English.

I first thought it was the game and that would be hilarious

 

[Hellfire]

They had a "list of people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder" but it was recently deleted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip...with_attention_deficit_hyperactivity_disorder

 

[autisticdragonkin]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Bisexual_artists
a few years ago this page had John Wayne Gacy in it

 

[KingQueen]

Something a little different:

Many years ago, Wikipedia was much easier to vandalize, until they created a variety of bots to scan and auto-revert. (I still find come across it accidentally with surprising frequency.) Locked articles sometimes got locked when trolls came en masse to vandalize, usually due to some current event (such as a celebrity death). So for giggles ( :autism: ) I started reading the Past Revisions on random locked pages to see what kind of dramafest caused the lock.

But what's interesting is there was a pattern to the random vandalisms I found:
- So-and-so was here (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vandals&diff=246975048&oldid=246974027)
- So-and-so sucks and is gay (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vandals&diff=173008050&oldid=172986784)
- Fart & Dick jokes (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vandals&diff=247976250&oldid=247975474)
- something that appears to be freeform stream of consciousness poetry (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vandals&diff=235657700&oldid=235657691)

Wikipedia is the modern man's bathroom wall.

(Also, while pulling examples for this post, I found that multiple vandals will first vandalize the page for their High School.)

(Also I learned that "vandales where terrible people and dome ass's".)

 

[Hellfire]

Something a little different:

Wikipedia is the modern man's bathroom wall.

(Also, while pulling examples for this post, I found that multiple vandals will first vandalize the page for their High School.)

(Also I learned that "vandales where terrible people and dome ass's".)

That's a good analogy. Since Wikipedia tends to be the top of Google/search results and "anyone can edit" it really does function as a huge bathroom wall.

 

[WWWWolf]

By the way, if you run into any deleted articles that you'd like to view, PM me. I can post screenshots (unless it has dox or something - or more likely, if it turns out to be very boring).

Wikipedia is basically an excuse to make explicit content without reprucussion. "Son, what is this shit? Looking at fucky porn?"

First I was like "okay, I don't mind people making illustrations and taking photos for educational purposes, even on sexuality topics."
Some time later, I was like "dude, we now have million dick pics for the reasons best known to the uploaders' mothers, let's tone this shit down a tad bit, okay?"

 

[QE 757]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_music

 

[Pigeon On A Stick]

The Italian Doges ruled over city-states for over 400 years, and have captivated the minds of artists for centuries to come. The article on this ruling class has ~700 words.
Doge (meme) has over 1,000 words, despite being invented three years ago.

 

[AnOminous]

The Italian Doges ruled over city-states for over 400 years, and have captivated the minds of artists for centuries to come. The article on this ruling class has ~700 words.
Doge (meme) has over 1,000 words, despite being invented three years ago.

These are called "wikigroaning." It's when you compare two articles on similar things or with the same name and usually, some trivial fandom shit gets way more words.

SA invented it a while back.
http://www.somethingawful.com/news/wikigroaning/

 

[ZehnBoat]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_music

This Exists just did a video on it
I think it's interesting

in the same way two drunk men will play chicken with a landmine and get themselves killed is interesting

 

[benzodiazepine]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadism_and_masochism_in_fiction
This list is way too detailed for it to have been written by someone sane. My favorite title of one of the works is "The Lustful Turk, or Lascivious Scenes from a Harem."