I knocked boldly at the gates of the Wiki gods, and they let me in. Or, more accurately, I exercised my democratic right to make stuff up, take stuff out and potentially alter the research papers of legions of undergraduates (more another day on how freshmen looove to quote Wikipedia and assume their professors are incapable of using google).
Anyway, I changed an entry. And it felt very good. You should try it sometime.
I was checking out a page on the little known 19th century journalist Nelly Bly and noticed that preceding a section on Bly's career were three mystifying sentences: "Doughnuts were popular in Bly's day. She was a reporter. So she reported about doughnuts." Despite their compelling, syllogistic reasoning, the sentences had no relationship to the paragraph that followed, nor to anything I know about Bly's career (as a journalist she went undercover to expose conditions at a mental hospital, and was not, to the best of my knowledge, a doughnut reporter. But it gives me shivers of happiness even to imagine that such a career might exist).
Because the sentences were so obviously a prank, I clicked the edit button and deleted them. It was very satisfying and took all of ten seconds. Now I'm a little sad that they're gone, but I'm not about to put them back in. Take a look at the entry. The sentences used to appear directly under the section head, "Asylum expose." That section (now freshly delivered of doughnut references) still needs work. It appears to be missing a transition sentence or two; more than likely they were deleted by The Vandal.
What kind of doughnuts did Bly investigate?
This morning I was still wondering why anyone would bother to "doughnut bomb" an obscure Wikipedia page, and I just so happened to click over to my favorite food blog and discovered that Friday was--drum roll--National Doughnut Day!
Of course! What better way to celebrate the day than by sprinkling (I can't help it-- I'm picturing rainbow sprinkles) random doughnut references all over Wikipedia.
Actually, I can think of one way, and it usually sets you back 50 cents and 300 odd calories. Yum.
