User:Jackwc123/sandbox

Wikipedia & The Jamming Thereof
Wikipedia is a Wiki with ambitions of becoming not just a stand-in for Encyclopedias, but a total source reference point for all human knowledge on the internet. Wikipedia is also perhaps one of the most powerful and unaddressed political machines of the 21st Century.

Hell Is a Place Where Nothing Connects
It is not particularly novel or controversial to assert that any enterprise which champions apolitical objectivity is inherently a political construct, neutrality is never truly neutrality, etc., thus it isn't a remarkable argument to claim that there is something pernicious about the way in which Wikipedia operates, particularly as its influence grows and it does become the de facto curator of "relevant" | information. One popular consideration is the semantic differences between "freedom fighter" and "terrorist," and how semantic word choices or structures of information organization can build an ideology one way or another (The Wikipedia page for "Wikipedia" presently has, in its opening, the counter-argument against claims that Wikipedia is a biased and untrustworthy source listed ABOVE the claims that Wikipedia is a biased and untrustworthy source, which is like the prompt for some insidious koan). "Neutrality" seems to suggest a "default viewer" for whom the position of this "neutral" point can rest; the existence of "neutrality" is dependent on a hypothetical field referee, in this case the admins of Wikipedia who, according to Wikipedia's own data, are unsurprisingly comprised quite overwhelmingly by | white men between the ages of 22 and 29. Thus, Wikipedia becomes an environment claiming to court objective, neutral truth, as determined predominantly by white men in their 20's. You don't need Laura Mulvey or John Berger to tell you this constitutes something of a problem.

"< !-- Please don't put a joke about recursion here." - Actual quoute from the Wikipedia page for Wikipedia's | source code.

I Have No Mouth & I Must Wiki
Wikipedia has become ubiquitous. Its pages no longer solely exist on Wikipedia, but are source fed to all manner of pages. Almost any website that automatically "pulls" information regarding a subject uses Wikipedia as its source, sometimes without even citing it - Wikipedia is swiftly becoming an ideology. Information gets scaled and condensced to be read in quick "bites" before escaping onto further morsel-sized tangents. Information as a snack, quickly consumed with minimal context and without critical appraisal. When everyone gets their information from Wikipedia, few people will wind up with significantly divergent opinions or perspectives on the same subjects. History could become what Nietzsche once feared it would - a form of uncritical regurgitation of statistical information. And this doesn't even begin to touch on the problem of self-consumption. Darren Wershler's Wikipedia page references (without a citation?) his past as a gravedigger. If Darren Wershler's Wikipedia page claims that he's a former gravedigger and it's NOT true, how long will it take before a journalist cites this information and MAKES it true by providing the false information with its own reference point. Through this process, Wikipedia can become its own self-referencing Truth machine. My God! Systems of information reverting into a snake eating its own asshole!

At the risk of being an alarmist for the sake of writing an interesting paper - we are at risk of losing our ability to become dialectical with the information we encounter in the world!

On the Website of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is Admin
This can be subverted through use of the democratic tools Wikipedia has lent to the service of its own construction. It may be the responsibility of Wikipedia's users to break Wikipedia in an effort to continually undermine its credibility. Thus far the practice of vandelism on Wikipedia has largely involved the more lurid and obvious "bathroom graffiti" approach, maybe closer approximating Wikipedia's dark mirrors of Uncyclopedia and Encyclopedia Dramatica; replacing | all the images on Hilary Clinton's page with hardcore pornography comes to mind. The current demographics of Wikipedia vandals are probably thus far just younger would-be Wikipedia admins. But it could become a lot better at what its doing. Consider Nelson Shanks' presidential portrait of Bill Clinton, with the distinctive but not immediately noticeable shadow of Monica Lewinski's dress |hanging in the background, or Bernini's Vatican-approved [https://www.romaexperience.com/rome-blog/2013/5/24/the-spiritual-orgasm-of-saint-teresa|St. Teresa orgasm]. A good Wiki-jam can be indistinguishable from its antithesis while containing secret subversive content. A vandal could work acrostics or patient fnords into edited passages, or pain-stakingly photoshop Zelig into the background of every photo of Donald Trump. And once the jig is up, its already too late - the subversive bomb has already been carried verbatim across the net. Works of subversive art hidden in plain sight, everywhere.

De Imitatione Wiki
Wikipedia has issues with images culled from sources outside Wikimedia, so the notable examples are hyperlinked:
 * A response to an on-air gaffe by | Kay Burley.
 * This description of | Spot the Dog
 * The true taxonomy of | Gary Oldman.
 * This Wikipedia article for Rashad Haughton, brother of late pop-sensation Aaliyah, clearly written by Rashad himself.
 * This perhaps more insidious example of | British MP's excessively doctoring their own Wikipedia pages.