GNAA Trolls Wikipedia
Wikipedia is an interesting and funny exercise in group-think. Many of its articles are top-notch, especially those which are extremely technical and arcane. But the general tendency is for article to erode over time under the pressure of fairly mindless conformism and mediocrity. The norm rules at Wikipedia, and a slavish adherence to rules that say “verifiability trumps truth” and similarly ridiculous things doesn’t help.
There’s a fun bit of performance art taking place on Wikipedia right now, as the highly notable troll alliance called “GNAA” (go to their site to see what the acronym stands for) is out to attract attention by removing blogger bios. The funny thing is that most of the Wikipedians don’t understand it’s a prank and are taking it seriously. This is hilarious.
H/T Doc Searls
UPDATE: The Wikipedians finally got a clue and stopped the discussion around de-listing notable bloggers like Tony Pierce. I’m sure this is a victory for freedom in some way.
- December 4th
freedom has to wait its day for victory
all they did was ban the original poster of the thread, stop new users from joining the conversation, and starting a new thread to start a new discussion because the old one was leaning too close to keeping my entry
See this link.
Welcome to Wikipedia, Tony, where things aren’t always as they seem but the tone is nice.
I will admit that I read the GNAA.us pages and downloaded the movie “Gayniggers from Outer Space” via BitTorrent (”Holy Net-Neutrality, Batman!”). It’s mercifully short, maybe 10 minutes runtime minus titles, and an obvious spoof of blacksploitation movies of the late 60s and early 70s. It had all the worst elements, including the misogynist males, misandrist females, gratuitous violence, and the funky electric guitar w/ string orchestra backup music track. It was mostly black and white (of course!) with some scenes at the end in color (of course!). It had a craptastic sci-fi story line, ridiculous gay humor, and the worst dubbing and special effects since Ed Wood’s “Plan Nine from Outer Space”, which I think can be blamed for inspiring this amateurish bomb.
Definitely _not_ worth the bandwidth or the time it takes to load the codec required for Media Player to run it.