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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."
Add it to the list in the xkcd article under Inspired Activities and redirect the malamanteau page to that subsection and be done with it. And now for some humor directed back at Munroe:
... xkcd readers and making money off of it. IT'S A WEBSITE! Wahhhh. Ooooh. What you don’t realize is that Wikipedia is making you all this money and all you do is draw a bunch of crappy web comics about it. It hasn’t been featured in the news in years. Its slogan is “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” for a reason because all you people want is to EDIT! EDIT EDIT EDIT EDIT! LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even is hosted for you BASTARDS! LEAVE WIKIPEDIA ALONE! Please. Randall Munroe talked about a fancy neologism and said if Wikipedia was a professional it wouldn't delete malamanteau no matter what. Speaking of professionalism, when is it professional to publicly bash something that is going through a hard time? Leave Wikipedia Alone Please ... Leave Wikipedia.org alone! ... right now! ... I mean it! Anyone that has a problem with Wikipedia you deal with me, because it is not well right now.
*puts blanket over his head and grabs a webcam* How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of Wikipedia after all it has been through! It lost its father, it went through a fundraiser. It had two fuckin libel suits filed against it. Larry Sanger turned out to be a user, a liar, and now he's accusing it of hosting childporn. All you people care about is
LEAVE IT ALONE!
My work here is dung.
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
Malapropism means to use a word in place of another word that makes the same sound, but doesn’t deliver an appropriate meaning, for example, odorous for odious, comprehended for apprehended and auspicious for suspicious and benefactors for malefactors. All these are Malapropos of each other. Now the second word portmanteau means to merge two words with each other in such a way that the sounds of the two words become merged as well as their meanings. In this case malamanteau is a portmanteau of portmanteau and Malapropism, whereas malamanteau is also a Malapropos of portmanteau. The meaning of the new word is still to be created properly.
I still think that the most scary(And interesting) part is that google now have 152,000 hits for the word. So a: Google is fast at picking up new words. It really generated a lot of interest and there are quite some spammers with some effective automatic page generation systems.
And people say kids these days put too much stock in wikipedia. Come on, they won't even let an undefined word be added even after it clearly becomes defined by xkcd.
Now the power to change google search results, make new words, and cause spontaneous gatherings at random locations. That's power that only stick figures can be trusted with.
This is also why Wikipedia should never be considered a good source of information. It's like two birds with one stone, a biavianlith if you will.
And now I need to go to go make a wiki page on biavianliths.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
The link in TFA: http://www.bbcnewsamerica.com/malamanteau-wikipedia.html
This site does not appear to be related to BBC News, it is actually registered to a guy in Pakistan:
Domain Name: BBCNEWSAMERICA.COM
Registrant:
Digghost.net
Shahbaz Ali (info@digghost.net)
DHA Lahore
Lahore
Punjab,54000
PK
Tel. +092.3218830642
Creation Date: 16-Feb-2010
For reference, BBC World News America has this website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/default.stm
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
That's a very hirsute observation.
There is a possibly apocryphal tale of two gentlemen in England int he 18th century who made a bet that in 48 hours a new word could be entered into the English Language. One found every ragged street urchin in London, handed him some chalk and showed him how to write "quiz". Soon Graffiti adorned every wall and park bench and by the next day it was on every lip.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
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.
So, I use Wikipedia on a daily basis for quick reference and as a jumping point to the sources. However, as a community/culture, I think its really just sort of gotten out of hand. Arguing for pages and pages about something which is really sort of inconsequential? Who do they think they are, Slashdot? (but seriously...). I first realized a few years ago that there was no point in trying to actually participate when I watched a revision war/flame fest between some random Swedish guy and an exchange student friend of mine who was from Georgia (the country), over stuff in the Georgia article. J. Random Swede decided that being born in a country, growing up there, and having had 20+ years of first-hand experience wasn't good enough to contribue some relatively minor points to the article, iirc. It turned into quite the little bru-ha-ha between Soso (my friend) and that guy, who wasn't exactly a Slavic languages and culture scholar himself, either. There is some value in wikipedia, but not enough to justify a bunch of bored, pissed-off nerds thumping around like some stiff-collar Britannica editors at the East India Club.
Some readers at the XKCD forums pointed out that the term may have originated from this MetaFilter thread back in 2007:
[blockquote]It's not spoonerism. More like a portmanteau combined with a malapropism. So I'd go with malamanteau or a portmanpropism.
posted by ludwig_van at 3:31 PM on July 17, 2007[/blockquote]
I say this because every person I know that uses wikipedia as a reference is in fact an idiot.
[Citation Needed]
"But this one goes to 11!"
...And does it matter? You know, disk space and bandwidth is cheap. It would cost what? $.0001 to create an article about this? And the flamewars going on about it are costing more bandwidth and disk space than the article itself would have.
Honestly, Wikipedia editors are the worst, they take what should be an encyclopedia filled with -everything- and try to narrow it down to fit what they want.
Does Wikipedia -lose- anything if it accepts an article that is a word coined by xkcd? Of course not.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
http://xkcd.com/195/
http://xkcd.com/249/
http://xkcd.com/426/
http://xkcd.com/681/
These seem reasonably original.
May the Maths Be with you!
The XKCD threat has officially been upgraded from "Unfunny But Harmless" to "Somewhat Annoying".
Luckily for them, the Internet doesn't scramble its bombers until DEFCON 2 ("Almost As Problematic As 4chan").
Read my blog.
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.
Well you can either ignore people by giving them what they've whining to get... or you can ignore them by sticking to your principles and not budging.
Wikipedia is supposed to be a collection of solid, sourced information. It's not supposed to be "a source of solid, sourced information... except when it's funny not to be!"
So Wikipedia is trying to stick to their principles and not let an entry degenerate into something funny but ultimately confusing. The only proper way to actually maintain the entry is to explain the origin and popularization of the word (specifically, that it is a word mentioned in an xkcd comic). Their current solution, a redirect to the entry on xkcd, seems reasonable until the term gains further notability and there's something to actually write about in the entry.
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.
The problem with the "chill out" argument is that the perpetrator of every joke-edit and piece of vandalism would like Wikipedia to "chill out"--but to allow all those joke entries to accumulate would seriously harm the quality and credibility of Wikipedia as a whole. Why does your joke-edit warrant the "throw away the rules" exception but all the other joke-edits do not? The fair and proper solution is to not allow joke-content, and to stick to Wikipedia's principles.
So, really, I think it is the joke purveyors (well-meaning vandals?) who should chill out, and accept that the jokes they are interested in do not warrant the "throw away the rules" exception.
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.
An internet forum is debating the proper formalism for creating neologisms on a user-edited encyclopedia.
Would I even be able to give my grandmother the slightest glimmer of what this is about?
The Far Side is, as well. Dilbert is somewhere in between them and xkcd, where it makes references to other funny material, but does have significant originality and creativity. Then there's xkcd, which is unoriginal,
My test is this. I work in a scientific establishment - not a super-geeky-web type place but an "old established science" type place. Over the last 2-5 years, "xkcd's on the door" have largely replaced the yellowing Far Sides... maybe about 1/4 of the doors around here are thus infected independent of each other.
On my own door is this and let me tell you I get more people just stopping to say how funny that is -old guys nearing retirement shaking with laughter and saying "how true" - than with any cartoon I've had up over the years.
Have you seen those pages vandalized with dozens of [citation please]? [citation needed] Too often it's a result of an asshole or douchebag putting the numerous [citation please] tags, just because he (usually a he [citation needed]) either refuses to use his brains properly [citation needed], or has some personal vendetta against the contributor [citation needed]. Because the asshole could easily have used: "This section may contain original research or unverified claims.". [citation needed]
There, fixed that for you.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
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