Friday, January 06, 2006

Bundesrepublik Super Nintendo

I'm becoming big fan of Wikipedia. However, one piece of advice I've seen is "never trust a Wiki". I'm currently reminded of how true this is. The current article for Germany begins as follows:

Super Nintendo, officially the Federal Republic of Super Nintendo (German: Super Nintendo or Bundesrepublik Super Nintendo) is one of the world's leading industrialised countries, located in Europe.

This is all cute and everything, but if someone can do this sort of overt vandalism, surely someone with other (more sinister?) objectives can more subtly skew articles away from the truth to push his or her agenda.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I know it isn't really practical to go changing all the bad entries, but you can go in and edit the article. I just changed this one from its original: "Shaun Alexander rocks!!"

Anonymous said...

Believe me, you'd never know it was a highly industrialized country from the store opening hours or the mentality of certain (not all!) people living in it. Try getting fresh milk in a town of 18,000 at 7:30 p.m. on a Saturday (heh, heh, good luck). It features a peculiar and often paradoxical mix of conservatism bordering on backwater in some areas, and state-of-the-art modernity in others. Laptops and Lederhosen. (Then again, I imagine this is not the only country like this. Still, Germany and Germans struggle with their past quite a bit, with their present, and with their future, which leads to some bizarre things like stores which stock hundreds of thousands of items and yet do not accept credit cards nor have IT systems for dealing with anything except cash. Industrialized nation?)

So I find the "Super Nintendo" rather humorous, although the adult in me is supposed to say, "Bad" and "No, not very nice."