Apparently November’s issue of Esquire magazine will feature an article about Wikipedia, the world’s largest (and, if you ask me, best) encyclopedia. That’s good news by itself, but the cool bit is that writer wrote a first draft on Wikipedia, and asked the community to revise it. Here’s the first paragraph of the first draft:
For those who haven’t looked at Diderot’s Encyclopedie recently, you should know that it is hopelessly incomplete. For instance, it lacks an entry on Exploding Whales. There’s nothing on Troll Metal (rock music about goblins that eat Christians), autofellatio (a form of masturbation that be traced to the Egyptian creation myth) or Dr. Bombay (the physician warlock on Bewitched).
And here’s the final revision of that paragraph:
What is the legal status of dwarf tossing? Did people really worship Jesus Christ’s foreskin as a relic? Where was crushing by elephant used as an execution method? And who is the mysterious galactic ruler Xenu at the heart of Scientology?
The article’s ‘writer’ famously read all 32 volumes of the 2002 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and subsequently wrote a book about the experience.
DarrenBarefoot.com 