Conor Lastowka - [Citation Needed]: The Best of Wikipedias Worst Writing

[Citation Needed]

[Citation Needed]

The Best of Wikipedias Worst Writing

Conor Lastowka and Josh Fruhlinger

Boring Legal Fine Print

Each entry in this book contains material from Wikipedia, although the text we use may not represent the current version of any article. The URL at the bottom of each page will direct you to the source Wikipedia article; use the articles History tab to find a list of contributors.

All material in this book that is taken from Wikipedia is licensed under the Creative Commons-Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license. Heres a quick human-readable summary of your rights to use this content:

You are free:

to Share to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and

to Remix to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.)

Share Alike If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.

With the understanding that:

Waiver Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

Other Rights In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:

your fair dealing or fair use rights;

the authors moral rights; and

rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.

NoticeFor any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Copyediting by Lauren Lastowka

Cover design by Jaime Robinson

ISBN # 978-1466346987

This book is dedicated to every person who wrote an entry that appears in it.

May your citations always be needed.

Introduction

Wikipedia. Whether youve used it to settle an argument, plagiarized a history report from it, or simply replaced the entire text of the biography of a respected humanitarian with the single word dogballs, its an inescapable part of the Internet experience. Since its launch in 2001, it has rapidly risen to become the seventh most popular website, with over 365 million readers (Source: Wikipedia). If youre like us, when you want to know the name of the kangaroo on Shirt Tales or just want to confirm that Mother Teresa was a dogballs who helped the farts (Source: Wikipedia), The Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit will probably be the first place you check.

But heres the thing about letting anybody edit your encyclopedia: it means that anybody can edit your encyclopedia. And while in theory this means that one day Stephen Hawking might decide to weigh in on the entry for string theory, in reality it means that somebody who deeply cares about pro wrestling is going to call someone else a Nazi when they revert his edits about Wrestlemania XI on Razor Ramons page.

And so we arrive at a cosmic intersection, where an obscure topic of dubious relevance is written about by the type of weirdo who logs on to Wikipedia to write about obscure topics of dubious relevance. Were these authors re-watching their video of Wrestlemania XI instead of completing basic 8th grade English assignments? Its very likely.

Does this stop them from attempting to emulate the academic tone of the great encyclopedias of the past as they describe a large mammalian species from the Star Wars universe that shares a common ancestor with the Wookies? It does not. The result? Some really terrible Wikipedia writing.

For the past two years, we have collected this writing on our blog, [Citation Needed]. Fascinated and delighted by the brilliantly bad writing we encountered in our Wikipedia browsing, we set out to curate The Best of Wikipedias Worst Writing. Starting the blog was a no-brainer; our only concern was whether, after a few months of our daily mining, the well of awful Wikipedia writing would eventually run dry.

By the time you read this, we will have published our thousandth entry. We started a podcast. Instead of drying up, the ocean of ineptitude has proven far more vast than we ever could have imagined. Through our own browsing, and with the help of a dedicated group of readers who are exploring the topics they submit for God knows what reason, weve continually lowered and re-lowered the bar for bad Wikipedia writing.

Now, lets get one thing straight: we love each and every entry written in this book. If you are one of the authors who have chosen to use your valuable time on this planet to write straight-faced exegeses on the subject of forgotten action figures from the seventies, we hope you dont take offense. And if you do, we have an acceptable retort prepared for you: You guys ran a blog about Wikipedia for two years, who the hell are you to talk? Feel free to use it!

Others may criticize us for not doing our part to help Wikipedia become better by revising these passages. Nothing that does not involve electrodes near our genitals would make us more miserable. In our opinion, many of the passages in this book stand alone as works of art. Think of us as photographers preserving the memory of the great street art of the world before the joyless police come and whitewash over it. (Is that an official police responsibility? It seems beneath them. If its not, but theyre still forced to do it, that might explain the joylessness.) The point is, if youre moved to correct these entries, were powerless to stop you. Theyve already given us joy, and were just happy to have encountered them.

Enough introduction. Here are over two hundred of our favorite bad Wikipedia articles of all time. Comments in italics are ours. Everything else is a faithful reproduction of the way the entry stood at the moment we or our informants encountered it. We hope you will laugh, cry, maybe even learn something, and always remember to dogballs.

Conor Lastowka & Josh Fruhlinger

citationneeded.tumblr.com

In barely one decade, Jimmy Wales has succeeded in establishing a worldwide network of knowledge. Wikipedia, his online encyclopaedia, accessible on the Internet for free, has become a symbol of a radical change in the media economy. Moreover, it revolutionized the access to knowledge as mans most important resource and thus contributed to democratizing knowledge.

The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, awarding the 2011 Gottlieb Duttweiler Prize to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

I saw the Beavis and Butt-Head episode that had Hogans Real American music on there. I dont quite remembering it being critiqued by Beavis and Butt-Head. They sounded more like they liked the music and I dont really remember any criticism of it (except for when it was going, when Butt-Head said homework sucks, but Im not quite sure if he was referring to music or not).

Wikipedia discussion page for Hulk Hogan

Polybius (video game)

The Roach story contained a number of inconsistencies: some of it seems to be directly sourced from Wikipedia- all in all, an entirely untrustworthy source.

Want a Citation for this one? Please see the remaining 95% of this e-book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius_(video_game)

General Mills monster-themed breakfast cereals

Franken Berry was very popular when first introduced possibly because the initial batches of the cereal used a dye that didnt break down in the body, causing many childrens feces to be bright pink, a symptom sometimes referred to as Frankenberry Stool.

You can imagine the marketing team having their first meeting after the cereals release. We have good news and bad news. The good news is, your latest cereal is very, very popular. The bad news is, its not in any way due to the character you came up with, the box design you slaved over, the costly ad campaign, or the hours you put in coming up with free toy ideas. Gentlemen, you should probably sit down....