Hello there. Lovely weather we've been having recently. A whole week of rain. This meant I could walk a lot due to filthy ghetto rats melting upon touching water. And by golly when I was walking one time, I said, "I should do a new reality check. But about what?" so I waited for something to come up that would piss me off enough to write about it. I was in theatre class when someone said, "o ya I hate wikipedia". After unleashing a verbal equivalent to an Arctic Warfare Magnum bullet, we were back to learning about theatre stuff. SO I FIGURED, HEY! Let's talk about Wikipedia. The misconceptions, the faggotry (yes), the elitism. Here we go. Baww, anyone can change anything so WIKIPEDIA IS INACCURATE! That's the #1 complaint you hear about Wikipedia. What these people don't realize (in that they never bothered to check) is that yeah, you can go in there and change the text, but chances are, someone's watching that article, and their email alert/RSS feed goes off and tells them a change has been made. What you must realize about Wikipedia is that it holds the largest white knight group on the Internet; people have admitted to stalking the "recent changes" page on Wikipedia for four hours straight, actually becoming addicted to it. On top of that, any pages that would generally be used for reports and the like (george washington, almost any important war, body parts) are protected against anonymous and just-signed-up users, so as to not constantly have blanked pages. Furthermore, people have actually set up bots, that is, scripts that run on artificial intelligence, to go through Wikipedia and make sure things as advanced as dates being changed simply cannot happen. So yes. You can go to a page, change George Washington's birth place to "Penisville, Arizona", but you'll be warned severely if not suspended for a bit from editing, and your amazingly hilarious and clever vandalism turns into a total and utter waste. Unless you were screencapping. Also, I should note, there was once a time in which some famous guy's page was vandalized with stuff like "PENIS VAGINA NIGGER", at the exact moment that Google cached it. Of course Google fixed it in the matter of hours, but that was some good stuff right there. Internet content is not always verifiable! Absolutely true. You should never take what you read on the 'net as fact. ( ... ) Anyone can make a website, buy a domain, some hosting, and throw false information on there. The problem is that, well, so can books. Just because a book is in a library doesn't mean its information is 100% correct. And in fact, that medium is a dying one because you can't go in and change things as humanity learns more about the subject. You think a dinosaur book from 40 years ago still holds true to the information we've discovered with not only new fossils, but more detailed and accurate ways of detecting fossils today? I imagine there will at one point be a time where books are more than 50% internet-based, considering a lot of classics are royalty-free and all that. Plus, as a writer myself, just imagine I make a typo or something, and it gets printed. Or a new grammar rule is added, or an existing one's changed. I'm screwed if it's written on paper! Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender's Game, reprinted that book thrice before he said "Ah, yeah, this is the one!", when all he had to in the 'net was upload the new copy with a changelog. So I do believe that as long as an article cites its sources, you should have the correct information. As correct as humanity will ever make it, at least... The Faggotry It's become very common in every wiki in the universe to be, how you say, "polite". I'm not going to go out of my way to be rude, but you must understand on the internet, it's sometimes needed. I'll get a lot of uptight and proper people attempting to hold up the beliefs of the wiki in stuff like, "No personal attacks on authors!" or, "No racism!". Come on, calling someone a niggerfaggot isn't racism. ;__; But regardless. It's just really something to me that these people will put so much effort and worry into keeping the wiki a nice psuedo-clean place, when it's like, hey, look out your window, because or world is tearing at the seams and the most you've got to worry about on the free speech of the internet is... swearing? Insulting people? I love on wiki's to just be a complete degenerative asshole. Because I generally contribute to wiki's I care about, what with improving grammar everywhere and whatnot, so it's like I'm trying to make a mini-point of showing people that you can speak like a normal human being would without being a burden to the wiki. And it's like that everywhere... If you've read my other Reality Check on the prim and proper people disregarding my articles in conceit, you can tie them together here. Another supremely faggotrice (yes) thing with wiki's is pretending that they're really going to be sued by someone for putting information of that person on the wiki. On GuildWiki, (PS: I play Guild Wars) my user page had a little man with a big goth girl, chasing her. etc. etc. So this one tool comes up and she's like "You have seven days to find the exact origins of those pictures and give credit where its due or else I'm going to delete them!". Obviously this is much out of my care-range and after being a degenerative asshole to her, they just ripped 'em off my userpage. Next time I'll just upload huge3.jpg to my page and see who says anything. Okay no, but continuing; you gotta ask yourself! Did removing my image on the wiki really do anything but piss me and her off? If I was the artist, I'd rather know someone out there was enjoying my work, even if they don't give credit, than no one enjoying my work at all. More of a powertrip by that user than anything, which is quite pathetic indeed. The Elitism Sorta having to deal with the above, there's a terrible notion going around that how much you follow the wiki's rules and edit articles and make sure every article has ugly [citation needed] marks everywhere, that you gain moar powar in the wiki. Now I'm not going to pretend seniority doesn't exist, but I'm thinking this notion comes from the notion you get when you see people with 500+ posts on a forum vs. someone with 20, and you just kinda think "this person has more experience on the forum". There's nothing wrong with that, and in most cases it's true, but on the wiki, I guess it just bothers me that these people don't realize their marks only mean stuff to them or people like them. Yes you help out the wiki, which is generally a good medium, but you should be doing it because you genuinely want to help the wiki; not because you want moar internet powar. So in conclusion, Wikipedia is a lot greater than you might've thought, people should seek real life power vs. internet power, and stop being so uptight on wiki's because you ruin everyone's fun. And maybe the wiki, too. May your edits be many and your vengeance be swift, Vael Victus