Essays[edit]

• "You don't have to be mad to work here, but" * ... some thoughts on how an encyclopedia is constructed, with apologies to Lewis Carroll and Dante Alighieri (thoughts)

• "Seven Ages of Editor", with my apologies to Will E. Spear-Shake. Shamelessly bowdlerized from his famous play However You Like It

• "How Wikipedia looks to newbies" ... not sure this was intended as humorous, actually

Wikaceous humour[edit]

• The right-wing press calls the WMF "Wokepedia" (yeah, bit of a misnomer) and "Greedimedia".

• Tim Dowling demonstrates "unscientific, anecdotal and wholly irrefutable evidence" (without trousers, as it happens)

• "Wikipedia works in practice, which is good, because it definitely doesn’t work in theory", according to The Guardian, on Wikipedia's 20th birthday.

• The mountaineer Chris Bonington described getting up the Old Man of Hoy as "like climbing the library. Everything I touched came away in my hand." Just the experience of editing a new area of Wikipedia.

• A plant article with hardly anything about the actual plant, full of editorialising about an earlier encyclopedist editorialising in his article on the same topic, complaining about the article's lack of anything much to say about the actual plant ...

• A 2000-year-old Roman joke (lightly retold): A Wikipedian sees an edit from a friend who hasn't been around for a while, and pings him with the words "I heard you died!" The friend replies at once "Well, you can see I'm still alive." The Wikipedian replies "Yes, but the place that told me you were dead was a more Reliable Source than you." (From the Philogelos or 'Laughter Lover', 4th Century AD)

• (Gould's) Evolution by jerks vs evolution by creeps

• WikiWeird: Listen to Wikipedia (really)

• WikiMazing: Watch Wikipedia being built (really) (thanks to Alaric Hall for this)

• Tutor tries experiment to show how unreliable Wikipedia is, students conclude the opposite

• Wikursion: Wikipedia article reliably documents embroidery of itself

• Venus dione, the sexually-charged seashell, according to Linnaeus himself

• Yup, both yoni and linga needed wikilinking here

• I say, Sherlock, Wikipedia really is a reliable source. Says Watson (computer).

• The Washington Post celebrates Wikipedia's 5,000,000

• We help the Internet not suck. Jimmy Wales

• Wikipedians are comprised of super-pedants. Who aren't even right. Says a sizeable section of the world's press.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted Louisa May Alcott as saying that Henry David Thoreau's neckbeard preserved his virginity, somewhere in his 16-volume Journals and Notebooks. Honest.

• How XKCD sees Wikipedia, from the sublimely encyclopedic to 'In popular culture'

• Wikipedians who add content are "substantive experts": which is to say, they're invisible, and never rely on their own knowledge... (and I speak as one)

• "Given the manner of its compilation, the accursed thing really is a whole lot more reliable than it has any right to be." Says Peter Thonemann in The Times Literary Supplement.

• Thonemann also tells the tale of how Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities was said to have sold 200 million copies, with the BBC, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Independent all recycling Wikipedia's canard without attribution!

• Fumblerules. Yeah.

• This "is so obviously the best Wikipedia referencing system ever devised by the human mind".

• In the Sokal affair, a physicist succeeds in publishing an article, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", containing scientific terms freely mixed with fine-sounding nonsense, in an academic postmodern cultural studies journal. It got away with asserting that 'physical 'reality'" is fundamentally "a social and linguistic construct".' See for yourself!

• Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luis Borges's fictional world featuring an encyclopedia (hmm...) which comprehensively (h'm.) describes the world of Tlön, a place whose inhabitants follow Bishop Berkeley in denying the reality of their world...

• An ant named after a search engine? Yeah, right

• 'Curious scientific names'. Or just downright silly.

• Cephalopod jokes on the BBC news, how could that happen.

• "An Indispensable Part of the Internet", writes Taylor Owen on CIGI: "While Wikipedia was once derided for its perceived lack of traditional authority (teachers and professors around the world have famously, and in my mind erroneously, counselled students not to use it as a source), the website is now the single largest home of reliable information ever created."

• Outriggr's marvellously lightly-worn learning in his poems upon matters Wiki, such as On the occasion of William Shakespeare's featured article candidacy by a group including user:qp10qp, which begins "Shall I compare thee to a Featured A? Thou art as lengthy and as templated:"...

• Project Osprey's experience, mirroring my own: "the trained educators behind all this. They rarely have any experience of editing Wikipedia but don't seem to think this is a barrier to them training others to do so. They fail to engage with what is well-known to be a community-based project. There is also clearly an assumption that so long as content is generated then Wikipedia's needs are being satisfied"... who also notes:

• "Among my friends and acquaintances, everybody distrusts Wikipedia and everybody uses it.... The information that it contains is totally unreliable and surprisingly accurate." Freeman Dyson, NYRB

• Wikipedia's Ebola coverage proved good enough for Oxford University Press to use, provided they didn't have to acknowledge its source. Doc James remarked in Signpost "that Wikipedia’s content passing a major textbook publisher review processes is some external validation of Wikipedia’s quality."

• Tacit knowledge: Olga Tokarczuk writes in her novel Flights under the heading "WIKIPEDIA" that "As far as I can tell, this is mankind's most honest cognitive project. It is frank about the fact that all the information we have in the world comes straight out of our own heads, [Eh? WP:OR?] like Athena out of Zeus's." She goes on "If the project succeeds, then this encyclopedia undergoing perpetual renewal will be the greatest wonder of the world. It has everything [Hmm, maybe one or two small gaps] we know in it". Seems great ... but she continues "Sometimes I start to doubt that it will work. After all, what it has in it can only be what we can put into words [well, or images or sounds or video...] - what we have words for. ... We should have some other collection of knowledge, then, to balance that one out - its inverse, its inner lining, everything we don't know [editorial emphases], all the things that can't be captured in any index, can't be handled by any search engine."

• Och aye the noo (intentionally bad Scots): a US teenager "wrote huge slice of Scots Wikipedia", apparently without knowing how to speak it himself. Then he became its Admin. He "improved" 49% of all its articles: today it has just shy of 58,000. That's 29,000 articles to clean up ... "some" have called for "the entire Scots Wikipedia to be deleted"; others to undo all the teenage admin's edits. Ouch. The Scots Language Centre in Perth is looking for "a team of volunteers" to clean the Augean Stables. Anyone out there named Hercules?

• How to caption a penguin:

• The right-wing rag The Telegraph names us "Wokepedia", as we're apparently a bunch of hyper-lefties who hug trees and flowers and spend all our time being politically correct (that's the "woke" bit) in the "most influential media company in the world". If they think we're all fluffy bunnies they should look at some of the edit-warring that goes on, not to mention AfD...