I am a big Wikipedia fan and an occasional contributor. It’s an amazing resource, but certainly subject to abuse. One of the more trivial but amusing abuses is the frequent overuse of the “In Popular Culture” sections for users to expound upon completely tangential topics, usually because they are a fan of some show, movie, music, etc. Today’s XKCD comic (7/7/08) mocks this by satirizing the pop-culture references of “wood.” I laughed when I read it.
What is truly hilarious about this, however, is that someone reproduced the joke in the actual “wood” article, essentially verbatim. Of course it was marked as vandalism and posts were temporarily disabled, but it lead to a highly ironic and amusing discussion in the Talk:Wood section about what exactly the point of the joke was supposed to be.
XKCD Comic: http://xkcd.com/446/
Wood article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood
Talk:Wood: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wood (you have to scroll down)
1 comment:
Oh this was you! Funny, I'm so used to you not posting (now that I've discovered your amazing blog) that when I saw this in my feed reader, I assumed it was a guy named Brendt who is also in my feed reader and posts a lot.
I guess Brendt is your nemesis.
Anyway, this was very funny, and as a worker of wood, I appreciated the humor. I even laughed. Silently.
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