inspired by this complaint, which prompted English Wikipedia to switch its sandwich photo from boiled eggs to baloney, here is a thread of the photos used in different language versions of the "sandwich" article
Italian Wikipedia uses a pic of an Italian hoagie uploaded by a guy in New York
Spanish Wikipedia has separate articles for sandwich and bocadillo
Wikipedia editors spent seven years and 140,000 words (longer than Homer's Odyssey) fighting over A SINGLE LETTER in the name of this dairy product. Thread!
In 2002, an anonymous volunteer created the article "Yogurt." Everything was fine until Christmas 2003 when someone named Derek randomly changed it to "Yughurt," the British Commonwealth spelling. An argument EXPLODED. It was like the Revolutionary War had never ended
BTW in the 2000s, tons of British vs. American battles were breaking out — Petrol vs Gasoline, Humor vs Humour, "Orange (colour)" vs. "Orange (color)," corn vs maize (which I posted about last year)
Sometimes Wikipedians get SO sick of people making the same edits over and over and over that they'll add angry invisible comments that pop up when you try to make a change. Thread of my favorites! 1. From "Beyoncé" (Texas birth certificates don't allow accented letters)
way too many people were changing the official wikipedia dog photo to a pic of their own dog
people were trying to mention The Hunger Games in the "See also" section of the Wikipedia article "Apartheid"
Not sure if Wikipedia admin drama translates well to a wide audience but last week, some of the most bizarre and perplexing shit went down??? thread
first of all, there's an article in the @wikisignpost that probably will give a more concise summary of this than I will en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia…
Okay so for a few years, there was this Wikipedia editor named Lourdes who would *occasionally* drop TINY hints that her true identity was Lourdes Hernandez Gonzalez, a moderately popular indie musician from Spain. Everyone was basically like, "okay, cool!"
Wikipedia editors got this article up minutes after the picture was released. Here's how
at 8:19pm ET Thursday night, a French woman with the username Tataral created the article "Donald Trump mug shot." At this point, the article didn't even contain the photo itself because the copyright is a little sticky
Federal mug shots are public domain but this is a state mug shot by Georgia, a state that does NOT classify mug shots as public domain (side note: I just learned that Georgia literally tried to copyright its own laws one time in Georgia v. , Inc).Public.Resource.Org
The Wikipedia editor dog is quite possibly my favorite photo on Wikipedia. Here's the story behind it!
First of all, he has a name! It's Graf, after Poligraf Poligrafovich, the dog in the Russian novella Heart of a Dog. Graf is literally all over Wikipedia. Here he is on the "Mongrel" article
(photo by his owner, Smallbones)
And here he is blocking the driveway
(pic via Smallbones)