Retro Yakking

This is another of those ‘…is stupid’ posts that addresses the flaws in a particular website, item or entity whilst conveniently ignoring the many positives said thing has to offer. It’s the second such article, following on from last week’s Twitter post, so I suppose that makes it an official series now.

Anyhow, get ready for more nonsense you’ve heard hundreds of times before only worded slightly differently and with one or two pop culture references thrown in there for good measure.

Everyone is always banging on about how Wikipedia is so awesome. Not a day passes without the mainstream media reporting how founder Jumbo Whales broke a nail, choked on a pretzel or broke up with his girlfriend via the site. Yes, everyone’s favourite free online encyclopedia has its good features, but sometimes you get the feeling it’s built up to be something it isn’t - namely the greatest thing since sliced luncheon meat. In a rational world, that would be nigh on impossible.

Because for its vast expanse of knowledge and devotion to the dispersion of information — which, I will admit, is a very noble and worthy cause –  it’s essentially just a gigantic forum with thousands of moderators and hundreds of trolls. As everyone knows, forums are for geeks and people telling newbies to ‘Google it or GTFO’, and Wikipedia is just one such community that ‘got lucky’ and made it to the big time. The really big time.

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A new report by Ofcom seems to suggest that British schoolchildren use Google as a kind of 21st century 8-ball. Remember those things? You asked a question, rolled the ball and got a randomly selected answer from a pool of generic responses such as ‘yes’, ‘absolutely not’ and ‘of course, what do you think I am, an inanimate object?’ Well, maybe not the last one, that would have kind of killed the illusion.

One in three British teenagers reckon the search engine ranks pages by ‘how true they are’, starting with the absolute gospel on the first page and working down to utterly fabricated nonsense by the fifteenth, presumably.

They are, of course, misguided, as anyone who has even so much as glanced at The Daily Mail website will know that it’s a great steaming pile of pap even though it tends to rank above truthful small-time Internet weblogs written by some fool pretending to be a yak or something. Still, at least Retro Yakking can claim a small victory in its first page status for the term ‘Hindley sucks’.

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Ever wondered what Wikipedia would be like as a radio show? Well, me neither, but it’s certainly a concept you can’t help but feel drawn to.

Such is the appeal of Bigipedia, Radio 4’s new sketch show series that spoofs (almost) everyone’s favourite free online encyclopedia. Not a completely original idea by any means, but the radio format is somewhat unchartered territory for the Wiki spoof, carrying with it a whole new set of challenges to overcome.

Most importantly, how do you convert a plain, scientific Wikipedia article into audio format without making it sound rather boring and matter-of fact in manner that more befits BBC News circa 1950?

Well, you throw into the hotpot a healthy chunk of good old subtle understatement and very British sense of humour, along with some intuitive narration methods that create an aura that’s unmistakably Wikipedian. There’s [citation needed]s aplenty to appease the wikigeek, and some clever aural devices that make you feel as if you’re actually reading a wiki article.

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The Daily Sport have today reported that small-time Internet weblog Retro Yakking has been hoodwinking its readers for months by posting copy-pasted content from free online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

It is thought the tabloid had become increasingly jealous of the website’s success of late, so decided to stir up some controversy over their competitors. But Alf Hart, spokesman for the Sport, refutes this allegation.

The evidence is there for all to see. We started getting suspicious when Retro Yakking became increasingly involved with Wikipedia, frequently posting ill-informed ‘news stories’ about the encyclopedia. Upon further research, we found large portions of content which was, in fact, stolen from Wikipedia. — Alf Hart, Daily Sport

The Daily Sport have forwarded their evidence to Jimbo Wales, who would have released a statement about the situation but has much better things to do, like using a spud gun to hunt rats and playing crown green bowls with Fabergé Eggs.

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Copyright dodgers and advocates of free content media were left cowering under their beds today as news that a Wikimedia Commons user was threatened with legal action over the use of copyrighted images.

The user in question, DCoetzee, uploaded over a hundred images from the National Portrait Gallery, London over the past year. The images were tagged as ‘Public Domain’ works because the creator of the paintings has been dead for more than one hundred years.

The essential problem, though, is the difference between interpretations of the law in the UK and the US. Mr. Coetzee is a US citizen, but because the NPG is based in Great Britain, the legal proceedings would be brought against him in a UK court of law. There is no real precedent of cases of this kind on our side of the pond, though.

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