‘These laws won’t be effective at their stated goal of stopping copyright infringement and will cause serious damage to the free and open Internet,’ said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. ‘Or, to cut to the chase, they could mean that the only way to watch a Thai amputee fellating a dwarf is to fly to sit in a cabin smelling of used condom in Amsterdam and hope none of the junkies nick your wallet first.’

PIPA and SOPA – which, contrary to articles posted on Wikipedia yesterday, have nothing to do with the Duchess of Cambridge’s sister or pictures of naked women with implants lathering themselves in a shower – are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by websites out of US jurisdiction. According to Wales, however, they may actually infringe free expression while harming the Internet.

‘Putting the burden on website owners to police user-contributed material means that if you want to make a mint out of selling a clip of two Brazilian transexuals doing disgusting things with farm animals you will have to watch it yourself first,’ warned Wales. ‘Do you want that? Because I don’t. Seriously, no.’

Added Wales: ‘Those who have grown up with an open, secure, and free Internet may take it for granted. But let me tell you, if you’d been a teenager in the 1970s and had never seen pubic hair except in a crumpled-up copy of ‘Oui’ you found discarded in a hedge by your school or had to sneak down to your parents’ living room in the middle of a night and sit through two hours of cod-philosophising in a French art house film before finally getting a two-second glimpse of a fandango, you’d be as frustrated and irritable as I am right now … What? Oh, shut UP.’

‘I’ve found records which show that my late colleagues were having a bit of a laugh after a night on the port and decided to make-up the most ridiculous stories, then created a deep history to substantiate them’ said an embarrassed Professor. ‘I’m afraid we need to close the department here and at every other university in the world.’

‘If you think about it, the clue’s in the name. They couldn’t have gone more out of their way to embed a coded message when they invented the term, but somehow it just stuck, and there’s even WikiPedia references to the subject now. It’s become a monster.’

‘The good thing is that my conscience is now clear, and I can focus my attention on proper scholastic research on the book I’m writing on Christianity, the virgin birth and the resurrection.’

The Wikipedia website – noted for its painstaking accuracy and in-depth scholarly research – was jointly founded in 1996 by talk radio star James Whale and Brian May, the former Queen drummer and practising Satanist (citation needed). It is the fifth most visited site on the internet after Youtube, boo.com, Ocado.org and the British Skin Foundation website.

Early life

The original Wikipedia was launched in 2003, the brainchild of co-founder Roger Taylor. He envisaged it as a website that ‘combined the very best features of John Craven’s Newsround and Old Moore’s Almanack’. The idea was sold to billionaire Facebook founders David Zucker and Jim Abrahams in 1989 as ‘a sort of Dorling Kindersley of the web but without so many pictures and facts’.

Wikipedia concept

Users can contribute to Wikipedia at any time between meals. They do so by viewing a short video on the website from the Wikipedia features writer Dr Heinz Woolf and then making a Paypal donation to his Nigerian bank account. This open source user-generated income means that Wikipedia is able to cover topics that would not otherwise be properly represented in encyclopaedias, such as the exercise-fad Zuba and rock singer Joe Dolce. Facts and suppositions can be changed at any time without affecting the accuracy of the individual entries, meaning that Wikipedia remains a vital educational tool for many some 33 years after its creation.

Criticisms

Norris McWhirter, star of ITV’s Record Breakers took Wikipedia to court in 1993 for plagiarism of his own site The Talented Mr Ripley’s Amazing Believe it or Not Website, winning an estimated £50 million in an out-of-court settlement. More recently Stephen Fry has criticised Wikipedia for ‘dumbing down the dissemination and consumption of the written word to suit people’s three-second attention span’ in his Twitter feed.

However, champions of the online encyclopaedia defend Wikipedia for its commitment to the same democratic principles which have revealed Ben Nevis to be the world’s highest mountain, and the first man on the moon to be Dai Barry of Swansea.

Related pages

• Wikipedia celebrates 100^th birthday
• Wikipedia during the French Revolution

(Published under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike 3.0 licence. Re-use of this material for any purpose is strictly forbidden.)

Jointly funded by internet search giants Google, Yahoo and Bing, examinations test what students can find out about a variety of topics, including vampires, where celebrities live and the big conspiracy theories. Students keep a blog instead of coursework, and conventional one-to-one sessions are replaced by poking tutors on Facebook.

Ian Goodall, part-time computer salesman and Dean of Wikiversity explained, ‘Using chat forums we spoke to red brick university students and well over 120% said they were more interested in finding out about stuff posted by individuals on the internet than learning traditional subjects based on, like, boring real facts. In terms of significance today is on a par with that momentous day in 1066 when Lance Armstrong and Buzz Lightyear first landed on the moon.’

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‘When I showed it my friends they were quite impressed and they asked me who had created the entry, after all they said, you are hardly famous.’

‘I think my friends were surprised when I owned-up to creating it myself, and they assured me that it would be sure to attract attention and be added-to by Wikipedia readers.’

‘When I checked the very next day they had been proved right and from half a page it had grown to the extent that I needed to use my mouse to scroll to the bottom of the article.’

Collins says he ‘Is not entirely satisfied with the new content but feels unable to amend it as people have gone to so much trouble.’ The article now contains amendments such as ‘When Collins was at school he was the short smug bastard who fancied Miss Pritchard from the art department (no citation needed)’ and it also went on to declare that ‘Collins was so tight that he could peel and orange in his pocket’ and that ‘His wife has just ended a four year affair with one of his best friends, still at least the baby will not have ginger hair like Collins no-balls.’

‘My friends assure me that as more members of the public hear about me they will want to add to the article. It’s all very exciting really and I can’t wait for my ex-girlfriends to read it.’

A new on-line user generated concept from the creators of Wikipedia is hoping to end all religious strife across the world. The so-called Wiki-Bible project plans to have one on-line holy book for all world faiths, written and edited by the world-wide community.

‘Like all ideas, the genius is in its simplicity,’ said creator Karl Eckstein. ‘If someone feels strongly that the central tenet of another religion is fundamentally wrong, then they can go on-line and change it. This morning the Wiki-Bible stated quite categorically that there was but one god and his name was Allah. This afternoon, another editor had corrected that to explain that there were in fact a number of different gods including Ganesh, Krishna, Vishnu and Cristiano Ronaldo.’

It is hoped that by asserting their version of which is the one true faith, fundamentalists around the world will be diverted from asserting their beliefs through violence or religious persecution. ‘But we hope that eventually, people of all faiths will accept this as the one true holy text for all mankind’ added Eckstein. ‘Plus if you find yourself having broken one of the central commandments of your religion, you can always go online and change it. This morning the seventh commandment read ‘Though shalt not commit adultery. Unless it is with thy neighbour’s wife Janice.’

The Wiki-Bible site has been swamped with visitors since its launch, with thousands of editors from the Vatican, Israel and Mecca logging on to adjust the emphasis in the Wiki-Gospels. ‘There are still a few nuances to be ironed out’ admitted Eckstein. ‘I think that bit about God having promised the land of Judea to the Buddhists and Taoists as well might not be very helpful. And admittedly it all gets a bit confusing towards the end.’ But according to the world’s definitive holy e-book, for the time being the sacred text is quite clear. ‘And yea, God laid down his life for his only son. And his name was Luke Skywalker.’

Solicitors representing Carl Petersson, from Ipswich, admitted that Carl had always found it very difficult to talk to members of the opposite sex, and had no idea that they might be slightly disturbed by having him wait outside their front doors to recite the fatality statistics at Nagasaki. Now as well as a restraining order, the court instructed that Carl serve his community service by sharing his expertise, writing and editing articles on the online encyclopaedia.

‘‘Wikipedia is perfect for people like Carl’, explained the judge, who had been concerned to learn of the defendant’s increasingly obsessive behaviour. ‘Now he can spend hours and hours doing something useful while his local community is a slightly more comfortable place to be. That’s what’s so wonderful about user generated content sites; it keeps all those fixated males at home with their computers, instead of having them out and about, freaking out the rest of us.’

I’m really enjoying myself,’ said Carl, 44. ‘I’ve expanded the article on the Nazi death camps, and corrected a minor point of fact about the FV 4201 Chieftan tank. Plus I’m communicating with women in a different way now. Although it’s hard to know which of the many people on the Star Wars discussion board are actually female.’

Alex Ingram