Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Using Wikipedia's most vicious bastards for your own personal amusement

Thanks to Wikipedia's most vicious bastards, those brutal idiots concerned only with their own aggrandizement, Wikipedia's stated goal of presenting the sum of human knowledge without any monetary barriers will never be realized, and Wikipedia's potential will never get even halfway close to its theoretical maximum.

But it's not all doom and gloom when it comes to Wikipedia's most vicious bastards. Some of them can be manipulated for your personal amusement, according to "Dakota." She went to a cybercafe, got a new Wikipedia account, then chose three brutal warriors to target. She opened three tabs on the Web browser, each pointed to the User contributions page of each of her targeted bastards. Then, she randomly chose an article the bastard had edited recently, and made some random edit to it, something which "any normal person would realize doesn't change the essential meaning of the article at all." In some cases, Dakota made one paragraph slightly more verbose. In others, she made the wording more concise. Most amusing of all, she changed double spaces after periods to single spaces in some articles and viceversa, doing nothing else whatsoever: so, the article's byte count goes up or down a little, but it displays the same!

A normal person who patrols recent changes (do they exist?) would say to themselves, "That isn't bad, but it isn't good either. I might as well leave it alone." But not so with the brutal warriors Dakota targeted. They flew into a frenzy of angry reverting. "You have to do a lot of these quickly, and in a short period of time," Dakota explained, "because unlike you and me, brutal wikiwarriors are logged on to Wikipedia almost 24/7. If you just make one change like this, you're not going to get the full entertainment value of watching those morons act as if they're being martyrized."

Along the way, if you happen to spot any information that is wrong and you can correct without having to spend too much time doing it, go for it. It will only up the entertainment value when the idiotic warriors revert the correction.

A few more words of advice: "Don't edit the same article twice, or they can immediately block you for 3RR." (Actually, they can block you for 3RR even if you don't revert anything, which is why speed is of the essence here). "Don't blank any sections and don't create any new articles. Don't respond to anything on your talk page." And don't keep at it for longer than ten minutes or so. After that, log out, go to your user contributions page and just watch as the moron warriors fall over themselves to revert every single thing you did as quickly as possible.

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