Our friends at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the PC gaming partisans, uncovered a bit of a snarl in the Wikipedia page for now-primordeal gaming protoblog, Old Man Murray. An overzealous – or perhaps simply vindictive – Wikipedia editor had deemed the entry about OMM “unnotable” and fit for deletion. But within 24 hours, RPS had mustered such overwhelming support from the gaming industry (Valve’s Gabe Newell, Linden Lab’s Rob Humble, former Gamespot honcho Greg Kasavin, et al.) that the Wikipedia entry for Old Man Murray was rightfully restored.
Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica have been locked in a kind of cage match battle for relevancy ever since legions of high schoolers found the former was an excellent tool for half-assing term papers graduating on time research. One thing, however, that hasn’t changed is the length of an article still means something in the Britannica. On Wikipedia, not so much.
Wikipedia is still very much the domain for longwinded parsings of the esoteric, if not completely hallucinated bullshit, a lot of it depending on how motivated that subject’s fanboy corps is. Who’s gonna show up more, Q-Bert’s fans, or President James Buchanan?
Games Radar has put together a list showing the truly distorted priorities of Wikipedia editors and writers, if length is a useful metric. And I think it is. Because according to their analysis, Knuckles from fucking Sonic the Hedgehog gets 7,832 words, and God — yes, that Guy — rates 3,726. There are 14 other hilarious comparisons (Call of Duty vs. World War II; Electronic Gaming Monthly vs Time, etc.) So get out there and start padding entries that really matter: Niko Bellic’s (385 words).
The WTF World of Wikipedia [Games Radar]
I use Wikipedia. You use Wikipedia. We all use Wikipedia. But just what are we looking for, exactly? Nerd crap, it seems, with a list of November’s most-searched items turning up a ton of game titles. Guitar Hero III came it at #5, while Halo 3 also did OK, coming in at #11. OK, not OK, impressive, because they’ve been searched for more times than “Sex”, “World War II”, “Europe” and…”Penis”. Impressive or sad. Either/or. Making the list further down were WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2008 (#32), Wii (36), PlayStation 3 (39), Xbox 360 (41), Rock Band (60), BioShock (62), Pokémon (65), List of Wii games (83) and at #89, right after “Mexico”, is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. WikiCharts — Top 100 — 11/2007 [WikiCharts]
We frequent Wikipedia as much as the next guy, which makes us appreciate the occasional fanboy revision even more. For instance, did you know that the first time someone beat Halo 3 on legendary difficulty was back in 1753? Of course that’s not true! 1753 was so long ago! They didn’t even have electricity back then! They didn’t even have lightning back then to make the electricity!
Besides, every real Halo fan knows that Halo 3 cannot truly be beaten until the 2500s when Bungie’s historical video game prophecies come to pass. Freakin’ Wikipedia idiots.
UPDATE: Ahh, apparently this is clever cultural commentary based upon actual fact/Bungie glitches! Damn we love Wikipedians and their wit.
Ah, Wikipedia [wonderland]
For whatever reason, a discussion on teabagging cropped up in our Kotaku chat room this morning. It was work related, we promise. Anyway, in the midst of what became a lively, intellectually heated debate on proper formatting, we came across this entry from extreme teabagging resource and authority, Wikipedia: The practice of teabagging can extend not only from dipping one’s penis into the mouth of another individual, but also to placing the scrotum into someone’s eye sockets or nose, often as a punishment for their drunkenness, especially when carried out while the other person is unconscious, known colloquially as Russian goggles.
Crecente pointed out that he’d just acquired a pair Russian goggles for an upcoming trip. We bet. The entry continues:
Back in April, an edit to the Halo 3 entry on Wikipedia—which has to date seen over 8,500 edits—added the nasty little caveat “it wont look any better than Halo 2″ in response to the claim that it will “set a new high water mark for next-generation games.” That edit just happens to IP-traceable to Sony Computer Entertainment Europe’s Liverpool Studio. That edit was up for less than 30 minutes, but still, the fanboy damage has been done.
This Wikipedia Scanner thing is a hoot! First it caught EA trying to tart up its own image, now it’s caught the ESA trying to erase…well, the truth! In August 2006 and April 2007, someone at the ESA’s headquarters in Washington went a little snippy-snip crazy: In one paragraph, someone at ESA deleted a nuanced discussion of mod chip legality, replacing it with a flat assertion that mod chips are illegal.
Less than a minute later, a lengthy section on the positive uses of mod chips was deleted, as was a notation that the US Supreme Court has not yet dealt with the DMCA.
Finally, a sentence stating that mod chips are legal in Australia was removed.
The first two, not cool, but whatever. But the third? Doesn’t look good when you delete the truth. Mod chips are legal in Australia. The Australian High Court ruled in October 2005: There is no copyright reason why the purchaser should not be entitled to copy the CD-ROM and modify the console in such a way as to enjoy his or her lawfully acquired property without inhibition.
I thought that was good news! Guess it’s actually bad news. Terrible, even, and someone should really delete any mention of it before the unthinkable happens. Like an Australian High Court decision having any impact whatsoever on the laws of the United States.
ESA Altered Wikipedia Entries on Mod Chips, Abandonware [Game Politics]
