3 posts tagged “wikipedia”

This is one of those posts where I write because I feel like writing, not because I actually have something to say. I'm not quite sure why I bother to make these public; they're essentially a warm-up that I do, sort of like writing calisthenics, before I tackle my novel manuscript or a short story... just a way to get my fingers moving and my voice working and everything flowing especially since it's been a little while since I got any work done.

That still doesn't explain why I feel the need to share this utterly mundane and uninteresting rambling with you. I imagine if I thought about it long enough, I could ascribe some nonsensical reason to the behavior; off the top of my head, I'm going to go with pure narcissism, which is the fuel for about fifty percent of the Internet's content, anyway. Seriously, stop and think about it for a moment. Think about everything that you've placed on the Internet, all of the content that you've created. Not content that you've consumed, not things you've perused or enjoyed, but things that you've actually inserted into the greater series of tubes that is the Intertron. How much of it are pictures of you or the people around you? How much of your written material is dialogue about your life, shared with your friends? Perhaps I should ask this question a different; of everything that you've ever put up online, public or private, for whatever reason, how much of it is not about you?

This is not to imply that such a perspective is wrong. The reality is that this is a tool for facilitating communication between people. It's not a repository for artistic endeavor, any more than my phone is meant to be. But it never fails to amuse me (and I'm just as guilty of this as any individual) that so much of our social cyber-construction is built to carve little niches of ourselves, to put as much or as little of ourselves out there in the digital world. If you think about it, we're all vying for a little quasi-immortality (a phrase, incidentally, that amuses as much as "most unique"). Long after you've moved on, there are relics of your history floating around on the Internet, buried just below the surface, waiting to be unearthed with a little digging. These bits of data, these pieces left in the wake of your interest long after you've moved on will remain forever, as long as there exists a server to hold them. And it's always interesting to see how your little relics and artifacts can reappear, sometimes when you don't even expect it (and sometimes that's not a good thing).

For example, back when I was developing fledgling html skills, I made a series of websites on various free services, starting at a place called Express Pages before moving to Fortune City to Geocities and eventually, to Angelfire. At least one of those Angelfire pages is still up and active, because apparently, it's considered the primary resource for information on the drow god Vhaeraun on Wikipedia. Seriously, click the link and scroll down to the external links: "Citadel of the Mask Lord" was a website I put up years and years ago and then promptly forgot about. I'm not the one that found it and cited it for Wikipedia; I've actually never submitted anything to Wikipedia, ever, which rolls into the whole thing about all of my content online being about me.

Just something to think about.

I'm procrastinating on writing my essay by reading the Wikipedia article on procrastination. I don't even know where to begin in describing or even contemplating the layers of idiotic complexity into which my life has descended.

-Draxle

I love Wikipedia, for two reasons.

First of all, I'm the sort of person who will see or hear something obscure and then wonder about it. Whether it's a song that I heard or something I saw on TV, I consult Wikipedia to increase my own encyclopedic knowledge of useless shit. And really, I think that this is the purpose for the site; when I want actual, solid information, I consult experts and reliable sources that can stand up to academic review. But when I want to read about useless pop culture topics like Vaporwave or the bizarre, rock star inspired characters of the video game Guilty Gear, I turn to Wikipedia.

I also like the site because I have a short attention span. To me, it is supremely amusing to start reading about a topic and then follow the links from page to page, until you've connected a chain of such unlikely proportions that not only did you forget what you were originally reading about, your leap in logic has landed you in another dimension. An interest in something harmless and benign, say, for example, giant squid can lead to the odd, obscure and extremely interesting article on the mysterious underwater bloop sound. Read at your own peril, for the words in that latter link may well alter your very perception of reality.

But the best and most amusing aspect of Wikipedia are what I like to call "holes in the fabric of wikiality." If we assume for a moment that all information presented in Wikipedia is, in fact, hard, proven fact, then these moments are oddities and anomalies that reveal the fragile, delicate nature of reality's mandates. It is profoundly disturbing to think that one misplaced, idiotic sentence could so severely damage the infrastructure that is the mortal coil.

In fact, these are just moments of silly vandalism, but nevertheless, it's extremely funny to be reading through your article about Stephen Colbert only to be confronted by a nugget of wisdom like this:

"Before his was Stephen Colbert he was a space ninja. His most evil foe was a frog called i can't it not real butter. Also his still a ninja but he fight ninja oinkings with a chainsaw. He is the only that own a chainsaw or even use one."

It's even more crazy when you go to click refresh, and that cryptic message vanishes like fog in the morning light.

Mysterious, I know.

-Draxle