this is the opening salvo to the

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_reproductive_system

artcle.



i don't know which is worse...."which act main things" or impying that a woman can only achieve orgasm by self-love.

LOL.

Only on Wikpedia.

Wikipedia caption from the "Pussy" article: "She was frequently concerned with the welfare of her pussy."

And of course these are only appendages to the reproductive system, the part that actually produces the babies!

Edit: Ah, the ever-competent Iridescent has fixed it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=225067661

"revert to something that won't make us even more of the laughing stock of the internet."

MySpacey teenager admins might need that article for real life purposes. We must keep it of a high quality!

I'm sure Captain Peacock could help clean up this bit of impressive prose.

That is funny as hell, as an encylopedia entry. The totally earnest quality of it. Sort like the stuff Tommy Smothers would have said if TV had REALLY been uncensored in 1970.

You know, we haven't mentioned the meta-problem that Wikipedia represents a really tempting target for ironic humor. There's nothing quite so rich as some careful grownup trying to explain to some child some difficult fact of life, and screwing it up. And children are naturally funny when they get things honestly incorrectly in a way which still preserves some inadvertant deeper truth.

There is some of this dynamic as subtext in the Grawp vandalisms, note. Grawp's persona is a huge, overgrown, immensely strong fantasy child. A giant in physique if not mind. Think Lenny from Of Mice and Men, destroying things he'd like to pet. And he is treated with far less anger and a bit more indulgence than other vandals because of this, especially by female admins, who can't help themselves in seeing a bit of the kid who just had a huge accident with the grape jelly on the white carpet.

In any case, this only bolsters my contension that somewhere WITHIN WP there needs to be a safety valve for this kind of thing, such as user talk pages, and even user main pages, being left relatively free of restrictions. You can't just spin this stuff off into Unencylopedia or something, for it will not stay. Rather, it returns as as sort of vandalism which isn't (at the core) really malicious. Humor is a basic part of human thinking, and it's connected with child-rearing, I believe (I think it's actually what humor is THERE to do-- keep us from killing children). Wikipedia is, by contrast with most of life, a very humorless place, especially if you don't count the "vandalism." WP is far less humorous than the military, for example-- a place where discipline is even far more important. But the real military is rife with mockery on every level, even as it still gets jobs done.

Some of you will be guessing what I'm next going to suggest, which is that much of the appeal of WR is that we can be funny here about WP, whereas you can't do that anywhere on WP itself. It isn't entirely our collective massive intelligence which makes us a "draw." People may come for the anger, but they stay for the humor and the possibility of actually behaving like adults without fear of being thrown out by the bailiff. Wikipedia, by contrast, has gotten to be a courtroom which is perpetually in session, and where there's never any recess-- it just goes on and on and on forever, with the only way to escape it being to get up and head for the back doors.

As always, M, you are spot on.

It was a while back, but the Chris Hansen article had a statement in the lead sentence for a while that said "Chris Hansen is a cock blocker". That's probably one of the funnier ones that I've seen.

This vandalism remained in the intro of a fairly prominent article for a little more than three days. That's a little frightening.

It was exactly 3.161 days. Judging from the Henrik-o-meter from the month of June (as a surrogate for July traffic), we can assume that the article gets about 509 page views per day.

So, we can estimate that this travesty of content was opened approximately 1,600 times.

And none of them fixed it.

I thought we're constantly told by the Wikipediots that Wikipedia is so wonderful because of how self-correcting it is, and how crummy paper encyclopedias are because they can't be quickly corrected the way Wikipedia can.

Well, I doubt 1,600 people have ever opened Encyclopedia Britannica to learn that the female reproductive system is dedicated to "when a female recieves sexual pleasure by fingering herself or using a dildo".

I'd say the situation is more than just "a little" frightening, Root.

Greg

Yes, but maybe most of them were starving children in Africa who didn't know better.

What's more pertinent than the number of page hits is the fact that, from the history, at least two very experienced WP editors edited that page while the material in question was up and didn't see anything wrong with it.