Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

We rarely get comments here (sigh), so I (dropping my usual plural pretense for this uber-long post) thought I'd bring one up here from the post about Savage's appearance on The Colbert Report.

This is from uno, the founder of Wikiality.com, who was quick enough to register the domain name as soon as Colbert had coined the term:

Anyone is welcome to come and edit my site in order to improve it. Such is the nature of the opensource wiki model. As the site grows, more and more users will pour over old articles, hopefully improving them for the better. Obviously I'd like my site to have the highest calibur of truthiness known to man and we are slowly but surely getting there by tagging short or unrelated articles so they can be deleted or requested to make them better. We have given incentives to those who write good articles and the site grows every single day. I love your story and appreciate your thoughts on the matter.

Since I'm one of those who pore over and occasionally do my small part to add to or improve the articles on the site, I appreciate the admirable efforts being made to fortify the site's truthiness and faithiness, especially by WatchTVEatDonutDrinkBeer, who not only writes very funny articles, but also is on the forefront of fighting off the usual wiki vandals who infect that site as they do all wikis. (And he also seems to have an encyclopedic awareness of all the thousands of images that have been uploaded to the site.)

(My contributions there are one of the reasons that I temporarily abandoned this site in October and November. That along with a certain why-botheriness, as Malcontent recently called the attitude, brought on by lack of contributions or comments here.)

Wikiality.com is a great site overall. Readers of this blog who understand the nature of Colbert's satire and are looking for a safe-for-work chuckle at the desk should check it out. Add something in the spirit of Colbert or edit one or several of the articles marked as needing fixes.

The articles in that last link are guilty of excessive factiness which sometimes results from an excessive wikiphilia. As Colbert explained it, Truthiness comes from the gut, not from the mind. It's based on feelings rather than facts.

But an opposite problem often infects articles on the site, something that the admins call randomness. [I can't link to the example pages since that category seems partly broken at the moment.] This affects articles that seem to mistake the unique take on the world of The Colbert Report with the odd take of a site called Uncyclopedia. On that site, the humor derives from the utter absurdity of an article. Like Wikiality, Uncyclopedia eschews facts but it encourages near-total separation from the fact-based world.

Dozens of articles on Wikiality -- like the current (as I write) iteration of the Ted Kennedy article -- demonstrate that kind of Uncylcopedic vision. The random uncylcopedic articles on Wikiality often use the kind of made-up sci-fi-nerd genealogy demonstrated in the Kennedy article.

It's a fine line, but Colberican truthiness (in my opinion) generally requires at least a slight grasp of actual facts.

A good article for Wikiality.com should be something almost like the sillyness that Bill O'Reilly spews out each evening on his show. Almost like Papa Bear, but taken to the next level where the absurdity of his claims becomes apparent. That's the kind of thing that Colbert does so well each evening on his show. But it seems to escape some of Wikiality's volunteer contributors.

Both O'Reilly and Colbert's character start out with indesputable facts. Neither of them would spin out the kind of silly genealogy that seems to be popular with uncyclopedians. But both then spin the factiness in absurd directions. It's just that Colbert takes it farther until it falls over the edge.

The admins on Wikiality have created a fix-it category for articles that are too liberal, but so far there isn't anything similar to mark articles that read too much like direct quotes from a posting on a right-wing site like World News Daily (and, no, I won't link). I hate that article on Stem Cell Research because it really does look like it could be copied directly to a wing-nut site without causing much of a stir. When Colbert has approached the issue, he's taken it to absurd lengths that would surely irritate wing-nuts who focus on that issue. [We'd link to video examples, but Comedy Centrals dreadful video interface removes them almost as fast as the lame Viacom lawyers force YouTube to remove them.]

And that's the point. The language of articles on Wikiality.com should irritate liberals who can't find the intended humor, but the articles should irritate right-wing conservatives even more.

I'd love to see more of the bitchy-queen spirit of Queerty or G.A.Y on the site. It's truthy that the Colbert character thinks all of us are going to hell, but there's room (and even a need) on Wikiality to pull that attitude to it's silly lengths, to make it apparent as Colbert always does how absurd the attitude is.

So, please, head on over there and start editing.

Labels: Colbert Report, wikiality