Doesn't look as bad without the hyphen: Gropecunt Lane, which of course it doesn't have.

Wonder how long this will last as an FA on their Mainpage?

I'll bet it would never had made it past DYK...

I've got money on 24 hours.

I do find it funny that John Calvin's sandwiched between Gropecunt Lane and a sex scandal.

I love the needless reference here:



Kenneth Williams would be proud!

I predict the usual dispute over the different meaning of the word in the US to the meaning in the UK/Ireland/Australia.

You ain't seen nuthin' yet. Parrot of Doom and I were just warming up with that one.

Malleus, do you happen to know why Raul didn't save this one for April Fool's? While perhaps not quite as good as Ima Hogg for that purpose, it seems better than the Museum of Bad Art (in that it would fool more people into believing that it was a practical joke).

Parrot of Doom, one of the article's primary contributors, objected to it being used on April 1.

How about you guys do some research on my old mate Hugh Sottovagina (T-H-L-K-D), the 12th century Dean of York Minster? Lifting that up to at least good article status?

We discuss poor old Hugh here:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&sh...ndpost&p=160758

Huh - Mary Tofts could be good in a different way, since it's an obviously serious article about a practical joke (and a pretty good one, by the look of it). I'm going to allow this.

(Jon Awbrey to come by to label this Fancruft in 3...2...)

And I agreed with his objection. Just take a look at this masterpiece for instance, a much better candidate.

Oh, won't somebody be brave and add the obviously missing [[animal rights]] and [[animal welfare]] category tags?

Well, between this, Butt Hole Road, Crapstone, and North Piddle, one is compelled to
conclude that the English.....are awesomely crazy.

There's an entire song about the questionable place names in Newfoundland. Bear in mind that this is a small province with a population of about half a million, so they don't even have that many places that need naming.

Reddit thought it was funny.....

The U.S. has Intercourse, Pennsylvania (right in highly conservative Amish country), but that's rather tame compared to Fucking, Austria. Scunthorpe, England has a cunt in it.

Please, don't forget to mention that right nearby Intercourse, there is also Bird-in-Hand and the town of Blue Ball.

(Look how the Wikipediots have named the Blue Ball article, with the county name plunked in the middle of it, as if that's how ANYONE would ever call the place. Well, what do you expect from a geography scholar named "Ippittybippitty"?)

Anyway, if any of you -- especially Mr. Obesity -- are ever in the area of Blue Ball, you make sure that you build up a healthy appetite and visit the Shady Maple smorgasbord. Unbelievable quantities of good quality food, including some traditional Mennonite dishes like dried corn (another article that Wikipedia lacks) served in a sort of stew or casserole. The only sin associated with this place is that they are closed on Sundays.

Those crazy English people - naming towns stuff like "London"

This is good too,

There are a whole load of piddles in various forms in Dorset as they occur along the River Piddle, sometimes known as River Puddle, which is also associated with the Tolpuddle Martyrs. My older brother contributed some poetry to a Dorset poetry magazine back in the 70s/80s, and in the same issue was a poem by someone else which compared the River Piddle with the River Jordan, and contained such thoughts as "Don't wash me in Jordan, just dip me in Piddle"....

There's also Shitlington Common in Northumberland (not on wikipedia yet, but a manor house called Shitlington is). And there is a cave in Derbyshire (in the Peak District) which had its original name restored a few years ago after some Bowdlerisation. It is now The Devil's Arse cave.

My favorite "piddle town" (on the Piddle River) is of course Piddletrenthide -- a place which I have actually visited. Whilst thinking: "Damn, these English have crazy names for stuff, even though they speak English..." The Wikipedia article appropriately gives a Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide definition of where this name originates:

Been there, ate that.

The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Ralph Ginsburg's obscenity conviction in the 1960's in an opinion that specifically pointed to the bad intent supposedly reflected in his having his magazines mailed and postmarked from Intercourse and Blue Ball.

James Lambert, a professional lexicographer, comments on the principal author's talk page -

"... much of the stuff about the etymology really isn't entirely correct"


No matter, he'll wait 'til it's no longer on the front page to fix it.

Don't forget nearby Bareville, Leacock, Lititz, Fertility, and Mt. Joy.

On the other hand, Virginville is way over in the next county, clearly to stay far away from those perverted influences.

Nobody's going to call Wikipedia tasteless for picking such an article for the Main Page?

I don't think it's Wikipedia's proudest moment. It's locker-room humor presented in pseudo-academic form; cute, but not really something to go shouting at the top of your lungs.

Now we wait for someone to call Wikipedia a joke (not that there's anything wrong with that)....

Just what is "Extra Virgin" olive oil, anyway? How can something have more virginity than a virgin? You can be "Like a Virgin", or a "Slim Virgin", but what's an "Extra Virgin"?

I saved my little mini-rant on this subject for my Facebook page. All the Chester County moms read my news feed there, and I made sure to remind them that their little sons or daughters could be reading this sort of thing on the FRONT PAGE of Wikipedia at their school's computer lab or library.

I'll say this: not one of the people who commented on my feed were supportive of Wikipedia's valiant mission to spread "free culture".

I'm interested in what you have to say, even if you've posted it elsewhere. A quick copy-paste, please?

I don't give tuppence for the opinion of anyone who's offended by seeing the word "cunt" on the main page. Sad people.

"Cunt" is JzG's favorite word, isn't it?

They still have tuppence in the UK? When are you charlies going to follow the other sheep and put Euros in your pockets?

We do have two pence pieces in the UK, yes.

Is that another euphemism?


Perhaps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...&oldid=68914708

I'll let my daughter know your opinion.

Not as long as we have a Chancellor with any sense.

I'm flattered that your daughter cares about my opinion.

Superb trolling effort Malleus. 4 stars for impact!

(Will increase to 5 stars if the moral hysteria makes it into the news)

Wikipedia is not censored.

Malleus, I'm impressed with your work, as usual.

That is a false statement.

Jon Awbrey

On the olive oil label, the "extra" is not a modifier of the "virgin" adjective to the oil (which refers to physical production, no chemical treatment, but actually historically referred to first-press oil, making the name easier to understand). The "extra" instead refers to the best subgrade of virgin (one that has extra-low acidity-- a breakdwn product; and thus extra good taste).

You coulda looked that up on Wikipedia. Except for thei first-press thing.

I wish this would stop getting repeated as dogma. First of all, everybody can agree that "Today's Featured Article" *is* censored, since Raul has said (quite correctly) that he would never put [[Jenna Jameson]] there. For another thing, Wikipedia does from time to time make decisions based on good taste in its articles; for example, if a celebrity's lewd photographs cause a furor, and that gets mentioned in the article about that celebrity, the photos in question generally won't turn up there, even though their presence there would certainly clear the non-free content criteria. So yes, Wikipedia is, to a degree, censored, and there's nothing wrong with that. It could probably use slightly more, actually, though I suspect I'm still towards the libertarian end of the spectrum here.

Where does the line get drawn? I'm not sure. I wouldn't want to see a Shankbone photo as the TFA shot, even if it was unquestionably relevant to the scholarly article accompanying it. On the other hand, I'm not so much for leaving out photos of Mohammed because they're offensive to a good portion of the Earth's population (though I wouldn't really want them as the TFA shot, either, and I wish we'd just put the damned things in collapsible boxes as a courtesy to our readers). I have a hard time being offended by "Gropecunt Lane" -- they're words for Christ's sake -- but I suppose it's somewhat arbitrary to say that my value system should be the prevailing one.

So I don't know to what extent Wikipedia should be censored, but it certainly should be. And thankfully, it is.

Eh, I give it 2.5 stars. I am afraid he was off his game with that one -- more of a mild silly boy slap than the solar plexus haymaker that has become the Big M's trademark in putdown smackdowns.

Slip a bit of creatine in his tea and let's get him back in the game. I know he can do better.

Wikipedia does exactly what every other pubication does — they only censor what they don't like.

The only difference is, once again, the incredible height of pretension about being different.

Jon Awbrey

Well, Raul having the unfortunate power to make that call is a separate issue. I was speaking specifically in response to Greg's comments about kids being able to read the word "cunt" on Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not censored ergo (and speaking of Jenna Jameson) there will be lots of cunt for the kids to read about, among other things.

207,000 people can't be wrong . What I find fascinating is the sudden interest in this article.

Oddly, an article featured in earlier in the week only got 40.5k page views. I can only imagine more people are interested in geography, than botany!

Another article from earlier in the week got 87.0k viewers, around the same amount as the second article you mentioned ...I wonder if it's the same 80k people for both.

Probably in the same age range.

Both of them blow Alberta politics out of the water (though I'm hoping that tomorrow we'll see that people are more interested in 1930s Alberta politics than in the contemporary variety).

Echoing Sarcasticidealist, this isn't about censorship in any sense, it's about taste and respectability. A censorship issue would be saying that the article should be deleted because it might offend readers. This situation is quite different.

As a parallel, there are a variety of featured pictures that could be put on the Main Page, but they are not because it simply isn't necessary to put images of dead bodies and other similar content in such a prominent place. Should we delete the images? Of course not. A lot of them are historical and they are important images. But just as Goatse doesn't have a picture at the top of it, the Main Page doesn't need to stoop to such a level in order to make a poor joke. We have the project namespace for that.

A standard I've heard tossed around is whether a major newspaper (say, The New York Times) would put the content on its front page. Perhaps it's different in other parts of the world, but any respectable newspaper in the United States wouldn't go around shouting "gropecunt" or "cunt" on the front page. I don't see a reason to treat the English Wikipedia's Main Page any differently.