Wikipedia Sucks!

If you don't know, the A.V. Club, which is a sub-site of The Onion (formerly tied to the Gawker but now part of "G/O Media" thanks to the Hulk Hogan lawsuit which made the Gawker defunct), has a space-filler column called "Wiki Wormhole" where writers search for obscure-ish topics, then do write-ups of what they've found. So that means the "Gombe chimpanzee war" that Jane Goodall witnessed from 1974-78, or the story of Harry Grindell Matthews, who had sold his country (Britain) a Zepplin-fighting drone bomb in WWI, then afterwards in the '20s claimed to have built a "death ray"...which he would not allow anyone to see demonstrated. An electronic engineer over his head, a partial fraud, or a crank? "Wiki Wormhole" cannot decide.

There are so many articles of a Robert Ripley (Ripley's Believe It or Not) vein inside Wikipedia that the A.V. Club has been doing these since April 14, 2014, where the first entry was on Transhumanism ('member dat, kids?), and the next one was a list of toilet-related deaths. And so that's what Wikipedia has become - the Internet's collective junkdrawer, source for throwaway articles like how bar bets were solved by the Book of Lists (1977) or old Encyclopedia Britannicas years ago. UNLESS....this is a secret gambit by the WMF to keep the site in the public eye.

"jUNK DRAWER" is the perfect phrase. Everything you want to know about Donald Trump's pseudonyms, megabytes of idiotic detail abut Doctor Who and anime. Need info on small towns in someplace like Congo or Argentina, get lost.

"Wiki Wormhole" is such obvious no-cost filler. I feel sorry for the author; he's probably wasting a chunk of his writing career doing that bullshit. $20 says someday he will quit Gizmodo Media, and mysteriously find himself working for the WMF.

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 20, 2020 1:55 am

"jUNK DRAWER" is the perfect phrase. Everything you want to know about Donald Trump's pseudonyms, megabytes of idiotic detail abut Doctor Who and anime. Need info on small towns in someplace like Congo or Argentina, get lost.

"Wiki Wormhole" is such obvious no-cost filler. I feel sorry for the author; he's probably wasting a chunk of his writing career doing that bullshit. $20 says someday he will quit Gizmodo Media, and mysteriously find himself working for the WMF.

The writer for these things is Mike Vago, he's graphic designer and a published author of such oddball things as The Miniature Book of Miniature Golf which is a grooved-down golfcourse that you play with a tiny ball (bearing) and a plastic putter. Here is a video of what it looks like from the publisher. The guy mostly does children's books, writes the captions and does the art, like with Rocket, which is a trip through the solar system. The WMF will never get Mike Vago - he isn't a failed artist or wannabe programmer. In that way, Jimbo's Jungle is like the NSDAP before 1933, whose propaganda man Joseph Goebbles was a failed novelist (look up his 1929 novel Michael: A German Destiny in Diary Form), whose National Leader Adolf Hitler was never allowed to be in the Vienna Art School, and whose future founder of the SS and final word within the federalized police system and the Gestapo was a failed Imperial Army officer (because the First World War ran out) and a part-time chicken farmer - Heinrich Himmler. No, Mike Vago will float on, merrily unaware of the Hell in San Francisco behind these articles he writes.

Was considering trolling his Twitter--it's kind of pathetic

https://twitter.com/mikevago