Wikipedia Presentation

Wikiality
Monday, July 31st, 2006

Cobert praised Wikipedia for "wikiality." If you make something up and enough people agree on it-it becomes reality.

During the taping of his show, Colbert himself edited and successfully changed entries on his show and our first president, George Washington.  Although the changed information was edited back almost immediately, he showed clear examples of how easy it is for anyone to edit a page on Wikipedia.

Colbert then urged his audience to find and edit the Wikipedia entry on elephants (out of sarcasm for Republicans). He wanted his audience to add that their population had tripled in the last six months (a fact he freely stated to not know if it was "actually true").

Internet users and fans both took his bait and vandalizing about twenty articles on elephants. All users were blocked, included Stephen Colbert, whose account was verified to have actually edited the Wikipedia pages during the filming time of his show.

 Since then, Wikipedia has cracked down, making it much harder for users to edit and create false entries.  Subsequently, this ridiculous alternative was created.