Stephen Colbert Causes Chaos on Wikipedia, Gets Blocked from Site
Stephen Colbert on 'Wikiality' - the method of making something up, but getting enough people to agree with you so it becomes reality.
On Monday night's episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert addressed the online resource Wikipedia, that anyone can read or edit. Colbert praised Wikipedia for "wikiality" the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you, it becomes reality. Colbert's subsequent examples to prove "wikiality" would caused chaos on the site, and an administrator subsequently blocked his account.
In the segment, Colbert logs on to the Wikipedia article about his show to find out whether he usually refers to Oregon as "California's Canada or Washington's Mexico." Upon learning that he has referred to Oregon as both, he demonstrates how easy it is to both references and put in a completely new one (Oregon is Idaho's Portugal), declaring it "the opinion I've always held, you can look it up."
Colbert goes on to declare that he doesn't believe George Washington had slaves.
If I want to say he didn't that's my right, and now, thanks to Wikipedia *taps keyboard* it's also a fact.
Here's the fun part - Colbert actually did this. The Wikipedia articles on his show and George Washington were both edited by the user Stephencolbert to reflect the changes he declared on air as he tapped at his computer around 23:35 UTC - which is 6:35pm on the East Coast, during the taping hours before the show aired.
It gets better.
Colbert then urged his audience to find the Wikipedia entry on elephants and create an entry that stated their population had tripled in the last six months, a fact he freely stated to not know if it was "actually true," with his sidebar stating "it isn't." Guess what happened next?
Scores of internet users took Colbert's bait, repeatedly vandalizing approximately 20 articles related to elephants proclaiming the jump in their population over the last six months. Try looking up any article about elephants and you will find the article under a lock due to repeated vandalism, er uh, wikiality.
The brouhaha caught the eye of one Wikipedia administrator, Tawker, and his program to automatically spot vandalism on the site, reportedly eating up "too much" of his bandwith in the process. Tawker subsequently blocked Colbert's Wikipedia account to 'verify the identity' of Mr. Colbert. Tawker, unlike myself, must be incapable of telling time, as the logs corroborate Colbert's mischief. His notes on the block and blog entry, however, reveal he just wants to be mentioned or flown out to the show.
All this trouble over a man who, as his user page noted, is a 'defender of truth.'
http://spring.newsvine.com/_news/2006/08/01/307864-stephen-colbert-causes-chaos-on-wikipedia-gets-blocked-from-site
