Wikipedia Wierdo

Today’s link — David Icke

In case you don’t listen to Art Bell, David Icke is a conspiracy theorist who espouses the Illuminati conspiracy with a twist — the Illuminati are all lizard people. The article says that some of his theories about the Nazis and the Holocaust had made him popular with British neo-Nazis:

…Icke has strongly denied that he is an anti-Semite, and has stressed his belief that the Illuminati, which, he says, includes the Rothschild family, are lizards, not Jews.

It puts a whole new light on V, huh?

Today’s link — Image:Lawndart.jpg

This one’s short and sweet: an hilarious US government cartoon of a child playing with lawn darts. Remember lawn darts? I, like most people, never played with them, but I certainly recall thinking how funny the concept was when I heard that they’d been outlawed.

Today’s link — User:Rama/Sexuality_drawings

While reading the articles linked from Category:Sex-related stubs, I had noticed that one illustrator had volunteered to create pen drawings for many of the topics, sometimes with ironic details in the background. The most notable of these was the illustration for the potentially impossible sex-act of autocunnilingus, which features a model of a klein bottle on a shelf in the background.

Today I was sending a friend a link to the autocunnilingus image, when I noticed that the image was linked to by another article, namely Rama’s collection of sexual illustrations.

For those of you who aren’t intimately familiar with the usage of Wikipedia, this page illustrates a few lesser-known page types. For starters, whenever you see an image in Wikipedia, you can click on that image to be taken to a page devoted to it. This page can be edited like any other Wikipedia page, to allow the image to be annotated. Each image page even has a discussion page of its own where people can make suggestions or ask questions about the image (these tend to get vandalized a lot because they’re seldom trod).

This page itself, though, is an even more obscure page type. It’s a user subpage. A user can potentially create an unlimited number of these, by just creating new pages with a url like en.wikipedia.org/wiki/username/pagename. Such pages are used by people to store rough drafts of articles, to put up longer discussion items, and to create collections such as the one featured here.

Anyway, it’s hard to talk seriously about a page full of ink drawings of sexual positions, but I actually think Rama’s work is pretty impressive, in a non-pornographic sense. These pictures, which are of a delicate subject matter, manage to be informative without being either prurient or prudish. My hat is off to this volunteer. His work is one of the examples where Wikipedia goes right. The Wikipedia system is open-minded enough to have an illustrated article about doggy style sex, and mature enough not to make it into porn.