Let’s be clear on one thing. Wikipedia is an amazing tool for doing any kind of research. Sure, teachers and folk in general have good reason to warn people of how it can be unreliable—after all, it’s run by users and dedicated editors. But if you’re ever in doubt, check the resources. The internet can’t alter that.
What it can do, however, is still have some harmless fun with it. Since anyone can write and edit anything on Wikipedia, it has become a bit of a sport among netizens to slip in details that wouldn’t otherwise ever be present in an encyclopedic article. Note that this is considered a form of vandalism and if you are going to do it, do it how this Twitter page does it—in a harmless way with the Inspect Elements tool.
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Yep, there is a Twitter page, appropriately called Wikipedia, But I Made Them Up, that “vandalizes” Wikipedia articles using a very harmless browser tool to make it look like it’s the real thing, then takes a screencap of it and then everyone laughs at the pure absurdity of it all.
Bored Panda has gathered the best of the best posts found on the page and has created the neat little listicle for you to enjoy below. So, go vote, go comment, share the article with your funny friends, and above all, do not actually edit Wikipedia articles for the fun of it. We’ll explain what you can do instead, if you insist on having some fun.
More info: Wikipedia, But I Made Them Up
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Image credits: WikiOoc
So, Wikipedia, But I Made Them Up is a Twitter page dedicated to sharing screenshots of snippets from Wikipedia articles that don’t really exist. It might look like some hooligan edited the article, but we assure you no actual edits were made. Just some technological wizardry.
The page features mostly absurd, and sometimes just straight up spot-on, humor embedded into the Wikipedia environment. And nothing is really safe from this page: illustrations and pictures, the table of contents, the contents themselves, the references, everything that you could ever find in a given article can be altered from very serious to absolutely redonculous.
Note that there isn’t any actual vandalism happening. The page itself notes that it uses the Inspect Elements tool to make these edits—they don’t actually appear to anyone else other than the person making these changes. The page actually is against Wikipedia vandalism, so if you want to have fun, do it the harmless way explained further.
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Image credits: WikiOoc
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Image credits: WikiOoc
On personal computers, every browser has some form of Inspect Elements. It is a web development tool that allows folks to analyze and mess about with specific website elements, among others things. You can access this feature by pressing CTRL + SHIFT + I for Google Chrome or simply press F12 on Mozilla Firefox of Microsoft Edge.
This in turn opens up the tool where you can find the element selector function (box with a mouse cursor on it) and use it to select the area you want to edit. Once you’ve done that, the tool should automatically show you where the element is buried in the sea of code, where you should be able to recognize the phrase that you’ll want to edit.
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Double click, type in whatever, and you’re done. Take a screencap of that and send it to your unsuspecting family or friends. You can actually do the same with any website. Even Bored Panda.
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Image credits: WikiOoc
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As of this article, the twitter page has over 170,000 followers, with some of their most popular tweets racking upwards of 389,000 likes.
Speaking of which, among the most popular tweets on the page is the plastic patio chair that is both the strongest and the weakest material known to mankind, the grape that everyone knows, and the capybara who made a friend, but, rest assured, it can also make enemies.
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Image credits: WikiOoc
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If you’ve enjoyed this list, you might enjoy others that we’ve covered in the past, like this one about weird Wikipedia articles, or this one with hilarious things found on Wikipedia, or this one with actual vandalism (again, don’t do it) on Wikipedia, and these amusing Wikipedia out of context screenshots.
But before you go, there’s plenty more where that came from, so scroll on, and share your thoughts and acts of mischief on Wikipedia in the comment section below!
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Source: boredpanda.com