The War for Wikipedia

Gordon Remote was hanging out in the high school library one day, bored, when all of a sudden it hit him: why not rally the masses for an all-out assault on Wikipedia? It was just there on the Internet, waiting to be prank-edited en masse. He had made several fake edits of his own only to check back five minutes later to see they'd been reversed. This time, though, he'd get so many people together that the editors couldn't possibly keep up.

The plan came together so effortlessly it was like it had been divinely inspired: start a facebook event that declared the date of the attack, invite all his nerdo facebook friends to join in, have them invite all their nerdo friends, and then wait for the day when they could go at it. He ran to the computer room and created the event. "The War for Wikipedia," he called it. A self-important smile crept across his face as he filled in the details. The date was set: 1/11.

Later that day, a Wikipedia editor performed a facebook search for "Wikipedia," a task the staff was required to do once every five minutes every day. When this editor discovered the facebook event so recently created, he shuddered in horror. He quickly alerted the rest of the Wikipedia super-staff.

"What are we going to do?" he asked.
"The only thing we can do," the Wikipedia boss answered. "Start a counter-event on facebook and get as many people as we can to join our side and fight for the truth and sanctity of freely editable information."

Over the following weeks, the facebook events' attendance grew, but it was clear from the beginning that Wikipedia would be fighting an uphill battle against Gordon and the vandals. By the day before the attack, the latter group, nicknamed "The Lunchroom Liberators," outnumbered the former, "The Champions of Wiki," at least 3:1. It seemed the Wikipedians would have too much to handle.

"I don't think I can do it," said one of the more cowardly Wikipedians. "There are too many of them."
"We have to fight, Jimmy. We can't let those commies do whatever they want."
"I...I guess you're right."
"That's the spirit, Jimmy. Now keep practicing your edit maneuvers. We all need to ready for tomorrow."

They waited for the battle in the morning. The Wikipedia staff and their recruits gathered in computer rooms around the country, anxiously refreshing the edit history of popular articles, waiting for the first shot to be fired. Then it came--somebody replaced every other word of the Twyla Tharp article with the word "fart." So the editing and re-editing began.

After hours of fiercely chasing down and undoing edits, the Wikipedians lost pace. The work of the vandals nearly doubled, then tripled, as reinforcements arrived. The Wikipedians tried to keep up, but it seemed like the effort was lost. They fought valiantly into the night, but at approximately 9:05 PM, they surrendered.

Gordon demanded at first that he be declared King of the Internet with power to do virtually anything he saw fit. When they informed him that such a position was impossible to hold, he settled on acquiring dominion over the Wiktionary and getting every other word in Wikipedia changed to "fart."

And peace was once again restored to the Internets.