MAKING WIKIPEDIA TRUER? TAKE ALL OUR FUN AWAY!

Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, has finally decided to get actual experts and scholars to review contributions to its pages, which sort of gets you wondering why they never did so in the first place. When any user can edit any entry in an encyclopedia, well, then it's really not an encyclopedia, is it? More like playground for the ignorant and the playful. How else can one explain the paragraph on Mahatma Gandhi's page about his 4 years in Miami as a balloon animal-twisting street mime? Or the line in Lincoln's biography about him inventing velcro. That's just not true! It was Zip-Loc bags that Honest Abe invented, everyone knows that. How about that entire entry on the country of Freedonia, a fictional nation from a Marx Brothers movie? Good trick to pull on all those sixth graders, though, when it's time to make that school report on the small nation of their choice

Seems those fun days are over for those of us who enjoy editing encyclopedias with misleading or comic information. But wait! Wikipedia has not implemented this rule yet! It's still in it's final planning stages and won't be put into place for several more weeks yet, plenty of time for people to have the honor of contributing to an encyclopedia without the benefit of having any letters after their name! PhD, shmee-hD! Let's get busy here, and get our two cents in before the so-called experts take over! Hasn't accuracy and detachment in journalism been rendered obsolete by the internet and the Misinformation Age? Why should encyclopedia authors get to lord it over us with their factual and precise content just because they know stuff, the snobby geeks?

Who can prove otherwise if someone claims that Aristotle was really Irish? And where's the harm in claiming that the Peloponnesian Wars were fought over the proper recipe for souvlaki? It's possible, and as good a guess as any. Let the new "expert" editors sort these things out. With 3 million entries and counting in Wikipedia, it will take them years and years and meanwhile your version of things will stand as the official one. How cool is that? So Google a subject dear to your heart and get busy! Insert the name of one of your neer-do-well ancestors into the history of some royal family or other and claim to be a Baron or an Archduke if you like. Anybody questions you, tell them to look it up in Wiki. "And call me Sir Jimmy!"

Or you could do the same to some billionaire industrialist's family tree and show up at their lawyer's office claiming your cut of the family fortune for long-lost cousin Loretta. Worth a shot. All they can do is say no, but even then if you want to sue the family your claim will carry the weight of inclusion in an encyclopedia. With any luck the jury will be pretty dumb and they'll award you a few mil. At the very least maybe the family will give you a couple of grand just to go away and save them the legal fees. Either way, not a bad payday for a few minutes time having fun with your computer. Beats Twitter any day of the week.

If you're the kind of person who just can't stand to admit being wrong (and which of us isn't?), well, now you don't ever have to, do you? You know that long-running argument you have with your best friend about what is the largest ocean, where you insist that's it's not really the Pacific but the Caspian Sea? Well, Wikipedia can back you up on that with a few minimal changes to the entries on both bodies of water! So there! Or maybe you don't agree with the accepted wisdom of any given subject, and damn the proof to the contrary! Just change the encyclopedia and now Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo and cotton candy is the best possible nutrition available.

In this modern age of the squeaky wheel getting the most grease even when it is already the greasiest wheel ever but has learned to squeak like a thousand rubber duckies over a loudspeaker, truth is now an elastic concept at best. Truth is what is repeated loudest and most often, and if we can back up our absurd claims with a few Google entries, then those claims become automatic facts. Look it up, pal! It's a beautiful thing. We can now laugh at those earnest fools neglecting their Twitter accounts and chat rooms by sticking their noses into books and journals seeking the truth when they can simply create their own damned truth and have done with it. But time is running out, so get busy making it official that the Suez Canal was built by Druids and Leprechauns and the greatest person who ever lived was yourself. Wikipedia is about to take all our fun away, the spoil sports.