Wikipedia is commonly ranked as about the sixth-most-visited site on the internet. It houses a tremendous volume of information on literally millions of topics. The English Wikipedia alone accounted for over 4,850,000 articles as of mid April 2015. And among the millions of other articles in German, French, Japanese and dozens of other languages, the English Wikipedia accounts for less than 30% of the total article volume on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia articles are given high placement in Google search results for most topics, and, for topics where commercial websites focus on selling us something, Wikipedia is often the first search result that offers basic information that tells is what something is, what it does, and who uses it.
With the site’s high-profile, it would be difficult to spend any significant amount of time on the internet without looking at Wikipedia from time to time. Most people probably use Wikipedia casually as part of their normal web browsing experience, and this might include daily visits or only infrequent ones.
But there is a subculture out there who think of Wikipedia differently. They spend hours of their lives there and view it as more of a social club than as a quick place to find out more about something you read about in the newspaper. And, like Easter eggs in a video game, these folks have collected and created some hidden gems in Wikipedia that are worth a look. Some are only funny to the indoctrinated few who spend their lives editing Wikipedia, but most are funny, insightful and entertaining to anyone.
Normally only seen by hard-core Wikipedians, the few unsuspecting souls who stumble across them accidentally, and people linked in from articles like this, these are
some of Wikipedia’s Easter Eggs:
The Really Reformed Church Of Wikipedia
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Really_Reformed_Church_of_Wikipedia Although obviously satirical, the Really Reformed Church of Wikipedia has its own page, enlightening the un-indoctrinated to things like Wikipedia’s ten commandments (
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments) and even providing the lyrics to a number of Wikipedia Hymns. Interestingly, its page is far more extensive than similar devotions to the Reformed Church of Wikipedia
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Chruch_of_Wikipedia.
Wikipedia April Fools
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:April_Fools Throughout the years, April first has been a source of fun and amusement on Wikipedia just like it has in many other public forums and media outlets. It you’ve ever seen the BBC Spaghetti farming documentary from the 1950s, you’ll get the idea. Every April first from 2004 to 2015 (so far), Wikipedia is twisted for a day. Some jokes are obvious and topical, like the 2015 letter requesting the deletion of the Wikipedia page on Barak Obama (said to be signed by 47 republican members of congress). Some seem to only make sense to the people who wrote them, like satirical vandalism of hard-core editors’ user pages or inside jokes about obscure Wikipedia policies.
There is even a specific set of rules that governing the kinds of April Fools jokes can be made, in Wikipedia’s Rules For Fools page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Rules_for_Fools. Intended to prevent Wikipedia from devolving into chaos on April 1, some Rules For Fools include that humorous “Did you know" entries on the Main Page should be "clever puns rather than poop jokes and sexual innuendos" and that Jokes must not be hateful, discriminatory, or intended to make others feel unwelcome.
BJAODN
http://bjaodn.org/wiki/Main_Page ... BJAODN, otherwise known as Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense, was a page so big and popular that when Wikipedia decided it shouldn’t be on the site any longer, they spun out its own domain… bjaodn.org.
As the title suggests, this is a collection of bad jokes and nonsense that, although deleted from Wikipedia was considered fun or funny and saved for posterity as an example of the odd and humorous things that can get added to Wikipedia.
The site is so large that it exists as several pages ordered chronologically. Although many entries are mundane and many more are entirely inane, some creative and intelligent gems flourish in these pages. rnA personal favorite from BJAODN is a rhetorical analysis of Cookie Monster’s song “C is for Cookie” from Sesame Street, which describes the song as “a case study in persuasive oratory, emphasizing the emotional aspect of public speaking”.
The entry includes observations like “After rousing the crowd, Cookie Monster systematically lays out the logical underpinnings of his pro-cookie ideology…” and “Here, Cookie Monster uses a propaganda technique strikingly similar to that employed in George Orwell's Animal Farm by the pig Napoleon, who trained the farm's sheep to bleat, "Four legs good, two legs bad" on his cue.”
And Random Nonsense
And of course there are pages scattered throughout Wikipedia that address the odd, the bizarre, and the ridiculous. You might find them on your own, just virtually thumbing through this electronic encyclopedia. Pages devoted to odd but famous people, pages devoted to obscure phobias, and pages about odd cultural phenomena exist. For example, pages exist for the Pet Rock and the Mood Ring, both of which have entries for both the original item and a notable band or album that used the same name.
Weirdness flourishes on Wikipedia, and it’s out there just waiting to be found. And with Wikipedia growing every day, more nonsense and funny things are bound to appear all the time.