User:Bobamnertiopsis/Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club

Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club (CFWC ) is a Facebook group where members can share and discuss interesting Wikipedia articles. It was created on 24 September 2013. The group has over 35,000 members.

Format
The content of Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club is user-submitted. Members of the group create posts linking to interesting, strange, and topical Wikipedia articles through the Facebook platform. Posts may include selected quotations from the text of the article, commentary, and previews of image thumbnails. Lengthy discussion threads often follow each posting through Facebook's comment feature. Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club and other Cool Freaks groups are considered to be a part of the subset of Internet meme groups known as Weird Facebook, along with other groups such as Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash and Post Aesthetics. Weird Facebook groups are also associated with far-left politics.

Wikipedia pages shared by users have included articles such as toast sandwich, Osama bin Laden (elephant) and Three Wolf Moon. Members also post lists, such as the list of sexually active popes and list of lists of lists. These are often found by users who are in what essayist and Wikipedian Dorothy Howard calls "Wikipedia holes": going from one article to another by clicking the interwiki links found inside an article.

Occasionally, Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club posts will document vandalism or controversies on Wikipedia. For example, In August 2015, an edit war was sparked on Wikipedia over which notable Millenials would be listed on the article about the generation. A screenshot of one iteration of the list was posted to the Facebook group, where members debated their own ideas about notable members of the Millenial generation.

Moderation
The group's moderators and set of rules require trigger warnings for articles dealing with sensitive subjects, such as suicide, rape, gore, and animal abuse. Banned topics include genocide and serial killers. Deriding or knowingly ignoring the trigger warning system is also forbidden. Former group moderator Emmett Mirza has stated that Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club's sensitivity to triggering content is due to the fact that many administrators belong to marginalized groups. A separate Facebook group, "Banned Members Reinstatement Program", is used to help reinstate banned members who request to return following actions that have violated the rules.

In an essay written for Rhizome, Dorothy Howard said that what one moderator called rules that "cater to the disenfranchised" was an "innovation" for a Facebook group, because it contributes to the sense of community in the group. Howard concludes that "solidarity-building and collective self-governance" are as important to the Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club members as the content that is shared on the page. Sally Marquez cites the group as an example of how groups can take advantage of mediated communication, because of the ability to structure the community through the use of trigger warnings and banning users. The "zero-tolerance" policy towards perceived hateful content also sets Cool Freaks' Wikpipedia Club and other Weird Facebook communities apart from communities on websites like Reddit and Twitter, whose "commitment to free speech", Hudson Hongo writes, may be viewed as "tolerating harassment".

Reception
In her article "'Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club' Is the Only Facebook Group You Need", Sage Lazarro of The New York Observer's technology news website Betabeat compared the group to /r/Wikipedia, "except better, for it sprinkles actual information in between vacation photos and #blessed statuses, making your newsfeed somewhat worth looking at." Reyhan Harmanci of Fast Company also praised the site, calling it "a lightly moderated Facebook group where people post links to weird Wikipedia articles. It is fantastic dinner party material." Max Hall of the University of Sydney's student newspaper Honi Soit reviewed the Facebook group favorably, saying "it will swamp your news feed with links to Wikipedia's greatest hits and the guest commentary of weirdly invested group members." Gabe Bergado of Mic called Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club "a public Facebook group devoted to all the oddest corners of the online collaborative encyclopedia." Nathan Stewart of public research and higher education institution Sciences Po in Paris, France called it "[the] epitome of Facebook Groups". Paste named the group's Twitter account the 14th-best of 2014.

Tubefilter's Sam Gutelle compared it to the web series That Wikipedia List.

Cool Freaks' Wikipedia Club has received criticism for its purportedly strict moderation policies. Rory Cox of The Tab called the group's moderators "bands of extremist ideologues [who] patrol comment threads wielding 'the banhammer'." Vice's River Donaghey was also critical of the group's moderation, which he described as a "shitshow of esoterica, political correctness, and trigger warnings". He ultimately concluding that the trigger warnings created a sense of "fascist hypersensitivity."