http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/#1531623
The satirical current events show The Colbert Report, which airs Monday through Thursday nights on Comedy Central, has a history of messing with the mainstream media to comedic ends. But last night, host Stephen Colbert went after Wikipedia. The results, as always, were hilarious.
Check out the video for the Wikiality segment on YouTube. Colbert encourages his viewers to change the Wikipedia entry for elephant so that it says the number of African elephants has tripled in the last six months. The result? Various Wikipedia articles referring to elephants, African elephants, African Bush elephants, African Forest elephants and the like were immediately moved to semi-protected status by the site's administrators. Pages with the semi-protected designation can only be edited by registered and trusted users. Colbert's Wikipedia user account was also blocked from making edits.
One of the site's admins, Tawker, has posted his side of the story on his own blog:
Yes, that’s right. I blocked the defender of truth, Stephen Colbert tonight on Wikipedia. Yes, I am Wikipedia Tawker and yes, I blocked. That "joke" used way too much of my bandwidth ... In all, we ended up protecting 20 elephant related pages.
Tawker also claims that the site crash that conspicuously occurred at the same time as the Wikiality segment was not caused by the Colbert Nation's actions. "Ironically," he writes, "Wikipedia suffered an database overload at the same time that this went to air, but that was totally unrelated to the event." Looking at Colbert's block log, you can also see that Tawker challenges Colbert to put him "On Notice," or else the user account will remain locked. Fans of the show will know that Colbert keeps an "On Notice" board on the set of the show, to which he adds the names of his soon-to-be-enemies.
The whole series of events is a brilliant practical joke that exposes the fragility of online communities and the much-challenged trustworthiness of crowdsourcing. Or should that be truthiness? Eh, that doesn't quite fit. Unless of course you believe that it fits. In which case, it's perfect.
