1051: "Visited"

[ahammel]

Apparently the I read the non-humorous parts of the article something like "...literary blah blah blah Andalusia blah blah novel blah Burmese blah blah blah blah" and I was like "oh, George Orwell".

Not so much.

[cellocgw]

That image is just begging for "Ride of the Valkyries" to accompany it.

Or something from Queen.

Perhaps the music that accompanies "2001: A Space Odyssey"? (Sorry, can't remember the title of the work itself...)

.

Did you want the Blue Danube Waltz or Thus Spake Zarathustra?

I'm sorry, Dave, I can't choose that.

[iamspen]

He probably meant Bicycle Built for Two.

[pyronius]

I've always kind of wanted to go through an article on wikipedia adding links to any and all words for which there's a relevant article no matter the context. I feel that would probably exacerbate the problem though...

[justalurkr]

Searched "novelist social realism andalusia burma" and got this forum

Followed by the third chapter of a novel.

[MathUhhhSaurus]

Randall logic: Embarrassed by _____. Makes a comic about it for the entire world to see.

Makes sense.

[modis]

Am I the only person that keeps browser history forever? I have 57,368 items from 10/27/2010 until now. I would have more, but it took me a while to notice that setting Firefox to keep history forever only kept it for 3 months.

[iamspen]

Randall logic: Embarrassed by _____. Makes a comic about it for the entire world to see.

Makes sense.

Because making a comic along the lines of, "I looked up geology on Wikipedia and learned questionably accuracte information about geology," is comedic gold, I tell ya!

[gnoitall]

Wingsuit combat. Better than a kingsuit wombat.

Nice googlewhack: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22kingsuit+wombat%22.

[kizolk]

Nice one; as often with xkcd, there's a moment where I go "those are words, not pictures; is a comic really the best medium for this kind of things?", but I enjoyed it, so, who cares.

Anyway, I'm wondering (not necessarily because of the comic itself): Wikipedia vandalizing (or, to use a less connoted word, editing) is part of what makes the "xkcd culture", but on the other hand, is it really a good thing in terms of Wikipedia's credibility? Spoiler alert: I tend to think not (even though I don't have a clear-cut opinion on that). I mean, sure, most of the xkcd-inspired edits are completely harmless, but that's not the point. It's just that while it can be really fun, it gives the I-told-you-guys,Wikipedia-is-bullshit-you-can-write-anything-you-want-there crowd ammunition. Of course I know that if there were blatantly false info on an important article, it'd probably be removed relatively quickly etc., but I'm more speaking of Wikipedia's image -- its accuracy and reactivity are *very* important of course, but how people (including scholars/experts) view it is pretty important too!

Slightly more off-topic, but not really: I hope one day scholars will stop being the elitist douches they are WRT Wikipedia, and will start actually contributing. Being "as good as Britannica" shouldn't be its goal; I know that 100% accuracy can't be achieved, but it should be the goal. A peer-reviewed Wiki would be great! (And yes, I know there's one -- don't remember its name -- but IIRC it has less than 20 articles)

[Роберт]

Nice one; as often with xkcd, there's a moment where I go "those are words, not pictures; is a comic really the best medium for this kind of things?", but I enjoyed it, so, who cares.

Well, to be perfectly blunt, Randall does a better job at depicting letters than he does facial expressions.

[Copper Bezel]

Oh God, this is what I read XKCD for. Slice of life observations of geek kind. I know it's what gets Randall compared to Family Circus, but ... God. I wouldn't mind reading Bill Keane's Twitter dribblings if he also happened to be an interesting person.

[Polarity]

After Umwelt, I half expected this to have a trick where the links changed color depending on whether you'd visited popular sites recently.

[anian]

My colour-blindness must be worse than I thought. While I can make out a slight difference in shade, it isn't very clear to me at all. Have no problems with the colours on the real wikipedia though, those are very clearly different colours.

[San Fran Sam]

This reminded me of an old girlfriend who posited the theory that following Wikipedia links (or just links in general) for long enough will eventually reveal your true obsessions. For her, this meant that if she browsed and clicked long enough, she would invariably end up reading another article about either communism or anal sex.

Yeah, she was an odd girl.

Actually, it has been shown that if you follow the first link in every Wiki post you will eventually get to the topic of Philosophy.

[Coyne]

I wonder how long it will take until every single word in every Wikipedia article is a link.
Going off to a disambiguated page.
Where the headline, "xyz (disambiguous)" leads to a disambiguated page of the word "disambiguous".

I'm sure Randall could do a projection for us.

Like http://xkcd.com/1007/.

[Coyne]

This reminded me of an old girlfriend who posited the theory that following Wikipedia links (or just links in general) for long enough will eventually reveal your true obsessions. For her, this meant that if she browsed and clicked long enough, she would invariably end up reading another article about either communism or anal sex.

Yeah, she was an odd girl.

Actually, it has been shown that if you follow the first link in every Wiki post you will eventually get to the topic of Philosophy.

Which, when you think about it, isn't a surprise. The first link on each page is usually a generalization topic; as in, "this subject is a specialization of parent subject".

Follow up the tree and the most general subject is philosophy, for for a good reason. Philosophy is humans thinking about things, the very attribute that makes us unique. So, in a sense, all subjects generalize back to "thinking about everything", which is a synonym for "being human."

If you will, that is proof that all Wikipedia articles are really about us.

[Kitutal]

I can completely relate to this commit, particularly the title text. However, why did Randal draw the hyperlinks with underlines? Aren't wikilinks always styled blue without an underline?

In fact, if they were underlined as drawn, we wouldn't have the adjacent-links problem because the line would be broken.

wanted to say something about how they're only underlined if you move the mouse cursor over them, only at which point you realise you just wasted that fraction of a second, so I registered a new account, came back, and realised I'd slightly misread the post.

Still, the confirmation email came from the fora rather than forums, that just made my day.

[Evil McCoy]

Anyway, I'm wondering (not necessarily because of the comic itself): Wikipedia vandalizing (or, to use a less connoted word, editing)

I prefer "Randallizing", myself.

Wikipedia vandalizing (or, to use a less connoted word, editing) is part of what makes the "xkcd culture", but on the other hand, is it really a good thing in terms of Wikipedia's credibility? Spoiler alert: I tend to think not (even though I don't have a clear-cut opinion on that). I mean, sure, most of the xkcd-inspired edits are completely harmless, but that's not the point. It's just that while it can be really fun, it gives the I-told-you-guys,Wikipedia-is-bullshit-you-can-write-anything-you-want-there crowd ammunition.

I'd say it's definitely a bad thing. It can be amusing, but doesn't really make any point except "Wikipedia is easy to vandalize", which everyone in a position to be amused by it already knows. Moreover, it just leads editors to hunker down and treat any new edits as guilty until proven innocent, which leads to my next point:

Slightly more off-topic, but not really: I hope one day scholars will stop being the elitist douches they are WRT Wikipedia, and will start actually contributing. Being "as good as Britannica" shouldn't be its goal; I know that 100% accuracy can't be achieved, but it should be the goal. A peer-reviewed Wiki would be great! (And yes, I know there's one -- don't remember its name -- but IIRC it has less than 20 articles)

Scholars aren't unanimously elitist with regards to Wikipedia; in fact, many do try to update articles to reflect the current state of research in their fields (new ideas that have been supported in initial studies, old findings that have/have not been replicated across several studies, alternative theories and criticism of existing theories, etc.). The key word being "try". Because many Wikipedia editors have a tendency to treat new edits as suspect even when citations are provided.

http://www.npr.org/2012/02/22/147261659/gauging-the-reliability-of-facts-on-wikipedia - here's an example from NPR about an expert on the Haymarket riots who attempted to edit information he knew to be false out of an article over a dozen times and got accused of being a vandal. That discussion also goes into other quirks of the Wikipedia system that may discourage some academic types from contributing.

(Aside: Am I unable to post links with BBCode because of my low post count/recent join date?)

[Mattyboy]

Actually, it has been shown that if you follow the first link in every Wiki post you will eventually get to the topic of Philosophy. [citation needed]

Fixed.

[Kitutal]

Actually, it has been shown that if you follow the first link in every Wiki post you will eventually get to the topic of Philosophy.

from where you get to ontology, which links straight back to philosophy. anyone feel like testing this theory, how hard can it be to make a chart of all the articles on the site?

[pennypyro]

that's how David Carradine died? wow...him and Michael Hutchence...

[armandoalvarez]

Actually, it has been shown that if you follow the first link in every Wiki post you will eventually get to the topic of Philosophy.

from where you get to ontology, which links straight back to philosophy. anyone feel like testing this theory, how hard can it be to make a chart of all the articles on the site?

Maybe I'm doing this wrong, but I am getting closed loops that don't lead to philosophy at all.
If you count the disambiguation, it usually leads to a closed loop of two, so I'm assuming you don't count that.
Start with "human." (I started with "banana," but it leads to "human," so for brevity, start with "human."). The first two links are disambiguations that lead back to human, so skip to the first link after them. The first sentence in the body of the article starts with, "Humans known taxonomically as Homo sapiens..." where "taxononmically" is the first link. This leads to the article on taxonomy.
First link after the disambiguation is to the article on Ancient Greek.
Ancient Greek leads to Greek language.
Greek language leads to Indo-European languages.
Indo-European languages lead to Language family.
Language family leads to language.
Language leads back to human.
So you have a closed loop that doesn't lead to philosophy.

[jpers36]

Let me just shortcut this Wikipedia/Philosophy thing and link to the Extended Mind comic thread.

(edited to fix link and comic name)

[JbrownF]

I believe this is only the second spelling error I've seen in xkcd. (embarrassd)