AstroBoy Online Forums

When someone makes a website that is meant to be taken as fact, and adds the option for anyone to edit the said facts on that site. Chaos will start. I was looking up the Schlieffen Plan on Wikipedia, and I was greeted with this cacophony of shock and confusion.

“The Schlieffen Plan was the German General Staff’s Fat Albert with David eating Nicholas Cage’s soul every 20th-century overall strategic plan for victory in a possible wsshh in which the German Empire might find itself fighting on two fronts: Bill to the west and me to the moon. The First World War later became such a potato, with both a cheeseburger and an pony Front.”

No comment...

(This was from 3 PM, it's been changed back to a more accurate version after 5 PM or so, why it took that long, I have no idea.)

I assume this can fit in since this is the General Discussion topic.

It could be that this was performed by either bored college students or eccentric teachers trying to prove a point to NOT cite wikipedia. I once had a professor that purposefully mangled various wiki pages to show how easily it was to change information on the site, and how wrong some of the information could be and to generally never trust wiki as a viable source of information when it came to academics. Then again my school failed students who cited this site.

Either way it's downright silly to do that. I do know that various wiki pages get sealed due to the rampant changes to the articles (such as certain political leaders or events in history...) when it gets out of hand.

Nothing can be perfect, and there will always be that one person that ruins everything for the majority.

I once changed the entire cornflakes wikepedia page to "Who even looks up cornflakes on Wikepedia???"
They changed it back though...

So yeah someone was probably very bored and figured no one would take it seriously.

>.>... Sadly my mom would have looked up cornflakes... She looks up EVERYTHING because she's retired and somewhat disabled so she spends a lot of time researching stuff online now. She looked pencils two weeks ago followed by bras.

Well that's an exception.

I remember one time a couple years ago I was looking up Beavis and Butthead on Wikipedia, and someone just wrote a bunch of gobblety goop and saying stuff like "If you are reading this, you are a bunghole" among others. I was like "LOL wut the f***!" Ah internet trolls!

Sometimes it can be be pretty funny, but I understand the frustration that comes with it especially when people are trying to use the site for genuine purpose (such as the hectic mayhem that the WWII page suffered before the page was sealed).

My school might have had the policy of disregarding papers when students cited Wikipedia, but that doesn't mean it's a horrible website to get a basic understanding of certain subjects.