Observation Dome: Amusing Wikipedia Vandalism

Amusing Wikipedia Vandalism

John Hoare / The Brittas Empire / 19-03-06 @ 01:05 / 11 Comments

It wasn't me, promise. But whoever did it is right - that ep is pretty terrible. A run of 35 spectacular episodes, with not a dud amongst them - and then this. A lovely idea for an ep - all the stuff set in the future, and the staff trapped in the centre - but how come Fegen and Norris suddenly forgot how to write jokes?

Comments

I hate Wikipedia for this very reason. All it takes is some bonehead to come along and add some sort of crap and--no matter how quickly it gets corrected--you end up with a load of people who've seen it and walk away taking it as gospel.

This "bollocks" example isn't really so bad, as it's clearly opinion, but let's say somebody wrote, "The only episode written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor" instead.

Obviously false to anyone who knows anything about either show...but give it a week and you'll find that tidbit appearing all over the place.

Human beings are already too gullible, believing all too easily in anything they see in print. Wikipedia makes it very easy to exploit that. I am not a fan.

By Phil on 19-03-06 @ 22:30

> but how come Fegen and Norris suddenly forgot how to write jokes?

Well they left after this didn't they? Maybe as a parting shot they deliberately wrote a shit episode.

By performingmonkey on 20-03-06 @ 02:33

That's what I heard about the Pixar film "Cars" as well - intended as their final film with Disney, Cars was apparently Pixar deliberately greenlighting their first essentially crap idea. Now they're actually sticking with Disney in a different capacity, Pixar have postponed the release date to rework it as a rather more decent film.

By James on 20-03-06 @ 10:18

By the way that "bollocks" word (the word "bollocks", but more specifically the word "bollocks" as encountered when you click on John's easy-link) isn't on the Brittas Empire wiki anymore, only a kind of archived version (I'd guess) that this site can for some reason still link to.

By James on 20-03-06 @ 12:15

Yeah, all versions of Wiki pages get stored in the archive, unless they need to be removed for legal reasons. Same as our Wiki.

Phil - Wikipedia is clearly a fucking amazing thing.

By Ian Symes on 22-03-06 @ 20:59

Doesn't than eventually mean Wiki pages will take up the entire universe? Like having a perpetually expanding bag to hold all these many new scrabble delux letters that people keep on wanting to add to the standard version?

By James on 24-03-06 @ 13:42

"That's what I heard about the Pixar film "Cars" as well - intended as their final film with Disney, Cars was apparently Pixar deliberately greenlighting their first essentially crap idea."

Definitely. Very likely. It's absolutely in Pixar's best interests to make shit film deliberately. What do they need profit for anyway? Better to harm a giant like Disney slightly and slash your own potential income. Especially at a time that would, otherwise, have been during attempts to do a deal elsewhere. Because there's nothing like going in with a position of 'We used to be great, but we're all burned out now. Please give us a job'.

Think I may have laid the saracasm on a bit thick there. Sorry about that...just doesn't seem very likely.

Oh, and I LIKE the Brittas special. So there.

(Some wank about sitcom evolving into black comedy about desitny, perfect for a sitcom that never had, or needed, 'jokes' in it to begin with...but I can't be bothered to trot it all out now.)

By Andrew on 25-03-06 @ 01:41

Well, it depends what you define as "jokes". No, there's no knock knock jokes in there, but just take the start of Not A Good Day..., with Sebastian Coe banging on about "Life Cycle week", with a guy on a bike having a heart attack in the background - I'd call that a joke. Perhaps "gag" is a better word. And Brittas is stuffed with them.

The special had some stuff like this, but just not enough. And I didn't feel the rest of it was sufficiently interesting to make up for it. There wasn't enough character comedy, either.

By John Hoare on 25-03-06 @ 12:27

"That's what I heard about the Pixar film "Cars" as well - intended as their final film with Disney, Cars was apparently Pixar deliberately greenlighting their first essentially crap idea."

Well, while I certainly don't think that Pixar would deliberately make a bad film (I don't think they can unintentionally make one either - they're like Aardman in so many ways), I think it's fair to say that given that Cars is a film that, largely, was being made to fulfil a contract that at the time Pixar couldn't wait to be done with, it's not unreasonable to suggest that it's not really going to have been the labour of love that, say, The Incredibles was.

Like I say, though, I don't think Pixar have it in them to make a lousy film; and even when they're not firing on all cylinders, even without the mass of creative genius input that results in a Toy Story 2 or an Incredibles, anything they do is still very worth seeing. And I think that'll be the case with Cars.

By Seb on 25-03-06 @ 19:34

"I think it's fair to say that given that Cars is a film that, largely, was being made to fulfil a contract that at the time Pixar couldn't wait to be done with, it's not unreasonable to suggest that it's not really going to have been the labour of love that, say, The Incredibles was"

Sure, but The Incredibles was the Brad Bird's labour of love - someone Pixar brought it to add new energy.

Cars is Lasseter's film, and while it may be 'by contractual obligation', Pixar would be INSANE to not put their all into it. It would harm their reputation, and their share price. Plus Lasseter has his own rep to think about.

It's a nice urban legend, but it doesn't make a lick of sense to deliberately make it 'bad'.

By Andrew on 25-03-06 @ 19:58

>Phil - Wikipedia is clearly a fucking amazing thing.

I'm not convinced. 500 amateurs writing about something does not equal even one scholar. And what with the ease of things being written deliberately false being taken as gospel...such as that retired reporter over here who was listed as being implicated in Kennedy's assassination...only for newswires who did stories since the Wiki vandalism to pick up that fact from other sites who got it from Wiki...he was rightfully upset. And whether its typical or not of Wiki is beside the point; the fact is that it can and does happen easily, and there's nobody there to really "check" you.

I know you're shaking your head and saying that if anyone contributes something deliberately false to the article readers will find it quickly enough and it'll be edited out quickly.

All fine and good, but, as in the case with the reporter (whose name I really should look up again), nobody knew it was false. There's a big difference between falsehoods and facts you don't know. So everybody had just taken it as something they didn't know.

For instance, if I were to pull up Johnny Carson's biography (somebody famous about whom I know pretty much nothing) and write that he was a Holocaust victim, that would get deleted within moments I'd say. Now let's say I wrote, instead, that one of his ancestors was the very first governor of Virginia.

That probably wouldn't be deleted for a long time, if it was ever deleted at all. Would anyone really do the genealogical work to prove me wrong? How many people would even suspect me of being wrong? I'm sure it would be met with, "Oh, I didn't know that," and so on. And I have just contributed an untruth to the world that will work its way into the minds of people who don't know any better.

Give me verified scholarship any day. It's imperfect, but at least it carries a sense of culpability.

By Phil on 26-03-06 @ 00:59

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Amusing Wikipedia Vandalism

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