WIKICITIES, Helmand, Monday (NNN) — The kidnapping of Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist David Rohde in Afghanistan was suppressed not only by almost all press syndicates but also by Wikipedia, on the direct command-and-control orders of Jimbo Wales, who is personally responsible for every word in the popular web-based encyclopedia.
Conservative commentators were appalled at the suppression. “Would they have protected HITLER like this?” thundered Michelle Malkin. Wales pointed out that the encyclopedia’s biography of Hitler had already been appropriately edited and cited per the Biographies of Living Persons policy:
Adolf Hitler is the Chancellor of Germany[citation needed]. He is noted[citation needed] for his work on the moral fibre of German society[citation needed] and stimulating the economy[citation needed], notably through the Autobahn construction programme[citation needed]. Some[who?] have criticized aspects of his policies[citation needed].
The Wikipedia Review message board exploded in outrage at the revelations. “And they called us conspiracy theorists!” said ardent Wikipedia critic, businessman and banned editor Gregory Kohs. “It’s not clear yet how this will make money for Wales’ private company Wikia, but I know that’s why he did it.”
The message board was further outraged at being scooped on the news. “This makes David Rohde part of the ‘hive mind,’ so the only way to remedy Wikipedia’s revelations of not revealing someone’s personal details in this particular case will be for me to put up David Rohde’s home address, names of his entire family and his bank account details on my website,” said public interest stalker Daniel Brandt. “I bet Google’s in on it too. They put a radio in my head, you know.”
“This raises many deep questions,” said free speech crusader Seth Finkelstein, “and it is important that many people keep at Wikimedia to get the truth, since they censoriously killfiled my email and viciously claimed to my editor at the Guardian that printing the stuff I write in blogs and letters to people’s employers in a mainstream British newspaper would constitute ‘deliberate malicious libel.’ I shall, of course, continue to pursue them to the end of time. Particularly that Godwin asshole.”
Many Wikipedia editors were also concerned. “Keeping details out of a Wikipedia article on a living person just because there aren’t any reliable sources because of a censorious conspiracy to keep him from getting killed is a slippery slope to the destruction of the trustworthiness and usefulness of every article in the encyclopedia,” said administrator WikiFiddler451. “People are seriously suggesting that our rules should be applied using common sense and a clue. I just don’t see how that could possibly work. Next they’ll suggest we ‘assume good faith’ or something.”
The Wikipedia Vandalism Patrol, who Wales ordered to suppress the information, deals with bad Wikipedia edits by determining if it is easier to fix the vandalism or adjust reality to the claimed facts. Wikipedia resets reality to match its contents using “wikiality,” discovered by conservative commentator Stephen Colbert. “Stephen’s one of our great successes,” said Wales. “We wrote that he was only parodying actual conservative commentators, and the liberals believed it! Of course, conservatives weren’t fooled by anything in Wikipedia.” Wikiality uses a “reality distortion field” similar to that used by Steve Jobs in his MacWorld keynote addresses, which is why all Wikimedia Foundation employees use MacBooks.
All information in Wikipedia must be verifiable in reliable sources. The “No Original Research” policy was first instituted to deal with “physics cranks. After the first few times the universe collapsed into a black hole when one of them squared the circle and we had to revert to the previous revision of reality. Way too much work. Brion was still a volunteer then, too.”
The death of Michael Jackson proved particularly problematic, with the article quickly becoming both the most read and most edited of the past week. “It took a while to decide what should have happened. ‘Heart failure’ covers a lot of stuff. The real story — the original real story, before we got in there and fixed things … no, you really don’t want to know. David Icke doesn’t want to know either, though he thinks he does. Really. No. Things are much better now. Trust us.”
The top category was “pointless babble” tweets, with nearly 98% of tweets being inanity no sane person could want to read, retweets of inanity, links to inanity, retweets of links to inanity and retweets of retweets of links to links to the reretweet itself. And camera phone pictures of bowel movements on Twitpic.
