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Wikipedia Is Not Amused By Entry For xkcd-Coined Word
ObsessiveMathsFreak writes "Today's xkcd comic introduced an unusual word — malamanteau — by giving its supposed definition on Wikipedia. The only trouble is that the word (as well as its supposed wiki page) did not in fact exist. Naturally, much ado ensued at the supposed wiki page, which was swiftly created in response to the comic. This article has more on how the comic and the confusion it caused have put the Net in a tizzy. It turns out that a malamanteau is a portmanteau of portmanteau and malapropism, but also a malapropism of portmanteau. All this puts Wikipedia in the confusing position of not allowing a page for an undefined word whose meaning is defined via the Wikipedia page for that word — and now I have to lie down for a moment."
These guys take themselves waaay too seriously.
There is a war going on for your mind.
This is the best example of why XKCD is an awesome web comic - a modern "funny" - I've seen in some time. In fact, I'd argue the societal commentary is often better - more cutting and intelligent - than you'll find most anywhere else (WSJ included). It's not always just "geeky" stuff, though Little Johny Normalization is a great example in that department, too.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The library is witness to both truth and falsehood
I'd check the quotation properly in my translation, but currently it's hiding somewhere in L-space, probably afraid to come out.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
TL;DR
Personally I've been done with Wikipedia for years, it takes itself too seriously... A lot of what humanity was, is and will be is nothing more than bullshit and tom foolery. And unfortunately Wikipedia has only nailed the bullshit part thus far!
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
"whose meaning is defined via the Wikipedia page for that word"
it's not. it's defined by xkcd _pretending_ that it's defined by wikipedia.
now, wikipedians, chill out. IIRC, there's an entry on the wikipedia's rules saying that you can throw away all the rules if appropriate. this is one instance where this could be use, so stop being so anal about it, include the fucking word and move on.
munroe is trying to throw a classic mind fuck on you guys. the more you bitch and moan, the more childish you look, which will have the effect of every cartoonist out there trying to do the same. every kid in the world knows that it's a lot funnier to poke the bitchy guy, and everyone knows the best thing to counter is to just ignore.
What ? Me, worry ?
The problem isn't really with xkcd. The problem is that there are tens of thousands of idiots out there who think they're as funny as xkcd. If the Wikipedia administrators only had to deal with the once-in-a-blue-moon comic vandalism by Randall Munroe or Stephen Colbert, this would be a non-issue. Unfortunately, when these idiots take it upon themselves to try to convince their buddies that they are as funny as the people who really are funny, it makes life awful difficult for people trying to maintain a useful site.
I'm GLAD they take themselves seriously. If we didn't have folks working on behalf of Wikipedia that did, looking up information on anything would be precisely as useful and informative as looking up information on malamanteau.
Wikipedia articles and wikipedia 'personalities' are two different things. You can use the articles while ignoring the personalities. Of course, if you want to edit the articles, you have to deal with the personalities, but who edits articles? Antisocial, egotistical wingnuts with too much time on their hands, that's who. You don't have to join the Cult of Wales to use wikipedia.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Cool. It's like a new and improved version of the prank involving the lengthy name of the new German Foreign Minister last year.
I've noticed this more often on the reality shows (when I catch glimpses on talk soup), the reality stars are constantly doing that, replacing the wrong word for the word they mean.
What is a person that suffers from this linguistical malady called? There must be a more clinical and less pejorative term than 'idiot.'
In the case of "reality" shows and daytime talk TV, I expect there is no more accurate word than idiot.
Who cares about pejorative? The truth hurts.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
Yes, I checked wikipedia right after reading xkcd when the comic came out. I was pleasantly reassured when I saw that wikipedia did not have an article for Malamanteau prior to the xkcd comic being published. Simultaneously and unsurprisingly, I was saddened by the fact that some xkcd fan had decided that since Randall said it, it shall be so, and created the page. And then I was even more saddened the next day when a co-worker sent me the link to the talk page... Holy crap, what is wrong with you people? Just because it happened on xkcd doesn't mean it gets an encyclopedia entry. No, the wikipedia editors aren't being assholes, they aren't killjoys, they're doing what editors do (slashdot editors should take a note: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1651380&cid=32198120).
Also, it seems like half the people commenting here are saying that because this article even existed, however briefly, it shows how bad wikipedia is and that they'll never use it again (or have already abandoned it). Completely ignoring the fact that the article was deleted. While the other half is denouncing that very deletion. They claim it shows how bad wikipedia is because the editors don't have a sense of humor by not allowing the article to exist. If you want a wiki with a sense of humor, the sites are out there for you. Go add an entry to Uncyclopedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica or Everything2.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
The correct response is "Good one. That was very funny! We are a project that lives and dies on the contributions of our users. You just demonstrated how quickly people on the internet can be motivated and organized to a single goal. We're hoping some of that energy can be directed towards making Wikipedia a better place. Thanks. -- The Management"
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
TL;DR
Oh, come on, it wasn't that long. I'm sick of people being so short in their attention span that they have to complain about any piece of text not short enough for Twitter.
Bow-ties are cool.
"Wikipedia sucks! Ya man, they're not COOL enough to let my favorite webcomic make shit up on its website!"
I think XKCD has the right to make whatever jokes it wants to. I also am more of the opinion that Wikipedia should allow the article to be published. For the sake of avoiding confrontation, Wikipedia should probably chill and let it through. In reality, though, all the thousands of people who vandalize Wikipedia every day who think they're SOOO funny just mess things up for everyone else.
Wikipedia has done more for humanity's accessibility to knowledge than most of us will individually in our lifetimes. So quit being so damned rough on a website with such a huge task at hand: creating an accurate, universal encyclopedia while fighting ignorance, stupidity, and malice.
Link 1: It's a map of the Internet. I remember seeing similar IP address distribution diagrams in the 1970s and 1980s. Up until about 1990, anyone working in IT at a university or large corporation would've seen similar diagrams daily. So this comic isn't even funny. Informational, perhaps. But there's no humor there.
Link 2: A similar idea was done in the Brady Bunch TV series decades ago, where one of the kids glues his hat and glasses onto his head so they didn't fly off when he was riding the rollercoaster.
Link 3: Of the examples you gave, this is perhaps the closest to being original. But it's just not funny. Where is the humor supposed to come from? I implemented hashing and encryption algorithms for years, and while I can relate the subject, that comic isn't remotely original, thought-provoking or humorous.
Link 4: Again, this is merely "informational", and isn't funny in any way. Most undergraduate-level astronomy textbooks have similar graphics.
A comic, by definition, tries to provoke laughter, or at the very least a sense of humor. You've just proved that xkcd doesn't do that. It fails at being funny. Not only that, but the ideas aren't even original.
xkcd is only "original" if you exclude everything created before 2005, and are ignorant about just about everything created since then.
At least 4chan knows that the sum of the worlds knowledge is more than can be described in 3 million articles.
May the Maths Be with you!
Is bbcnewsamerica.com anything to do with the BBC? I'm guessing not.... My first reaction to this story was to wonder how the BBC had ever managed to produce such a fugly website to be honest...
4chan is garbage, there's no higher meaning one could extract from that site.
Without getting into the argument about the notability of the term (I think it's quite notable, but I'm biased), "Malamanteau" should not have a Wikipedia entry because Wikipedia is not a dictionary, as Wikipedia will gladly point out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:NOTDICT
Wikipedia is a successful project. You can read mostly well-written summaries of nearly every single area of human knowledge, and for the most part it's accurate and accessible with nice diagrams etc.
I'm also tempted by that decentralized approach, but when I think about it I know that I wouldn't want to deal with ridiculous one-off articles like malamanteau just because people are having fun dicking around. The internet should be free and decentralized, and Wikipedia's policies are arbitrary and stupid, but sometimes you just want something that works! A coherent high-quality project can't succeed with waves of Internet anarchy pounding at its foundations. If you want a project where only experts and trusted people can edit, then go buy the Encyclopedia Britannica. If you want a project that anybody can edit then you have to deal with people.
that word becomes mainstream. people make languages, and internet is people.
Read radical news here
Quite cromulent as well.
It's really odd the wikiadmins should be complaining about someone else making up things to put on their site. All things considered, it seems somewhat hypocritical.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
It's precisely because it's so easy for random people to document made-up stuff on Wikipedia that the wikiadmins take such a hard line about removing it. Without a serious focus on removing such articles, the encyclopedia would be flooded with them.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Mistakes happen over and over again with regularity, and calls to fix these mistakes are met with paranoia and outright hostility. Any normal people were driven out of wikipedia long ago, all that are left are vicious, petty, power hungry control freaks. I don't take it personally, crazy people can't really be held accountable for their craziness. I just don't interact with them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Clearly you haven't been targeted by 4chan.
a handful of selfish greedy people are no match for millions of selfish, greedy people -u4ya
That is a very cromulent idea.
You can't win. Use "common sense" and you're being "arbitrary"; stick to a strict set of rules and you're "wikilawyering".
Well you can parse that both ways: refuse (to create) and (follow) or refuse (to create and follow). Besides which, arguably the have fairly strict rules and they do follow them (maybe: as well as humanly possible). Those rules just create a situation where a fictional place from what is apparently a fairly popular show does have an article, while a fictional place from a less popular show doesn't.
Having a notability criterion where "one fictional place is more notable then the other" doesn't seem very unlikely or unreasonable. In fact, it seems almost mandatory. Otherwise, I could make up any number of fictional places and add them. Maybe give them the same name as real places and create disambiguation pages while I'm at it.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Not suitable for Arts Majors.
You're doing the same thing the "idiots" are. You're being imprecise in your language. Why don't you find the proper word to express what they are?
The problem I have with Wikipedia is that it refuses to create strict rules and follow them. It has stupid 'Notability' nonsense instead where it's just totally arbitrary.
Even if (as others argue) the 'notability' rules are quite well defined, they're vulnerable to race conditions leading to recursive self-referencing.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Wikipedia (or rather, the people running it) is taking itself way too serious, and has for a long time now. Just read the comments of any edit war, or most of the delete request discussions.
Some seriousness is good and necessary, but when you're running a community project, you should never forget that there are only three base motivators for people to contribute stuff: Money, Fun and Fame. Since money is out, that leaves the other two. If you remove the fun by becoming too serious, you're left with a bunch of low-lifes who are trying to get the fame real life denies them in your community, usually through extended power trips. Ooops, did I just describe the average Wikipedia admin?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org