chuggnutt.com

I think we should start a new game: "What Can't You Find on Wikipedia?", or, alternatively, "Stump Wikipedia". Seriously, they have over 1.4 million articles now, and it keeps going up. Is there a ceiling?

Although you have to stick to real subjects... you can't punch something in like "nitrate waffles" and expect a legitimate response. (See Googlewhacking if that's the game you want to play.)

Of course, the irony here is even if someone were to find such a subject, that person or another could immediately create a new article for it... thereby negating the point.

So how soon before Wikipedia becomes sentient?

This article in the Bulletin Monday caught my eye: Dinosaur discovery. Part of a plesiosaur was unearthed over near Prineville last summer:

The self-trained paleontologists found what is believed to be the first remains of a marine reptile called the plesiosaur that has been found in the Pacific Northwest.

It is also thought to be only the third vertebrate fossil uncovered in the area so far from a rock formation that dates back to the Cretaceous period, the last of the three periods of the Dinosaur Age....

When South Dakota paleontologist James Martin excavated the site in May on behalf of the BLM, he found at least two nearly complete teeth, tooth fragments and a 3-foot-long lower jawbone of a 90 to 100 million-year-old plesiosaur. The pieces may constitute 80 percent of its lower jaw.

Martin thinks it was from a large-headed, short-necked plesiosaur that was 25 feet long from head to tail.

Pretty cool stuff—it's a long article (for the Bulletin), gets into detail about plesiosaurs. And, there's another first that I'm aware of: using Wikipedia as a source (and citing it in the article). That seems to me to be pretty clueful. Have they mentioned Wikipedia before?

One of my new favorite Wikipedia pages is the Unusual articles list. You gotta love that. Where else could you learn about such things as Heribert Illig, a German historian crank who claims the Dark Ages didn't exist and the years 614 to 911 AD are invented? Or that some guy legally changed his name to Optimus Prime, after the Transformers character? Or that the smallest park in the world is in Portland, Oregon?