If It’s On Wikipedia…Then It Must Be True!

The trademark of a gullible idiot: believing near on everything he chooses to read on Wikipedia.

Now I wouldn’t confess to something so naïve…but I most certainly will not deny it.

I’ve become obsessed! And not in the good way. More often than not, any vandalism posted on a Wikipedia article is incredibly easy to catch sight of – usually it takes the form of a childish insult/ego boost; something like “goerge bush iz teh gays LOLZ! I pwn j00 all hahah!” (and those misspellings are deliberate, since these people are either too ignorant, or too stupid to understand the concept of English). By the way, if you need help translating that garbled rubbish (I really shouldn’t be criticising that style of contracted English, as I use it too much over the Internet; even in everyday conversations. So I’ll retract the harsh comments that appear before this), roughly, it comes out as “In my opinion, George Bush is a homosexual. I am now going to laugh at this because I am a homophobe. In addition to this, I think I am Jesus Christ reincarnated.”

Okay, so you’ve deciphered the asinine ramblings of a 12 year-old. Big deal. I could do that in my sleep (that is to say if I slept properly). But now, you notice that there’s a different breed of vandal lurking around the block. A vandal who will stop at nothing in their attempts to induce worldwide confusion through subtle, yet dramatic alterations.

Take an incident that occurred during the dying days of last week, for example. Popular – or hated, depending on your opinion of him – celebrity Vernon Kay was forced to issue a proclamation stating that he was still a living, breathing human being, following unsubstantiated “rumours” that arose due to a series of edits to his Wikipedia page. The claim was that Kay had tragically died in a yachting accident in Greece. Not only was this not true, but another edit included mention of an arranged funeral service, to be held in Bolton this Friday.

The interesting thing about this was that the two edits came from two different IP addresses. My in-depth knowledge of IP address allocation is frankly limited to the knowledge of what my own one is. And even then, I don’t fully get why it is what it is. But if I were to hazard a guess, I’d say that the two “sources” transpired from either the same household, the same person using a different PC elsewhere, or two people agreeing to collaborate with one another to make it seem as though the claim possesses authenticity (a claim made by two different people is, on the outside, more credible than a claim made by one). But the foundation remains the same; it’s pure vandalism. The change is that it’s cleverer vandalism.

Anyone remember the Frosties kid? If you do, you may also remember the rumours that floated around about his "death". The supposed cause of death varied wildly, but the bulk of allegations implied that he had committed suicide due to bullying at school, or he was murdered for appearing in what was then the world’s most annoying advertisement. And in actuality, he wasn’t English – he wasn’t even British – and he’d been living happily in his native South Africa; enjoying the revenue from the advert broadcasts.

Black comedy is fantastic! On Wikipedia, however, it is difficult to assert its appearance. You need prior warning for it in text, and no self-respecting Wiki vandal is going to write “What appears below…is a joke” before their work, are they? That would blow the rebellious nature of vandalism completely out of the window! Could you imagine seeing graffiti that read “*insert tag name here*. Sorry about the inconvenience caused”? Had I read that Vernon Kay edit without knowing it was a joke, I would have taken to believing it was true, as most people did. According to an array of legitimate sources, his friends rang him up out of panic to check whether he was alive or not.

The lesson here is: don’t be like me by choosing not to digest everything on Wikipedia as fact!