Vandalism in action

Talk:Centrifugal force (rotating reference frame)

There are two relevant sections in this talk page: one of them is a discussion about the comic's relevance to the article and the other is "stop reverting the removal of the xkcd link."

There are reasonable people on both sides of the relevance argument, of course, but the point of interest to me is the "please stop adding the comic as if we'd reached consensus" discussion. Oh, those wacky xkcd fans!

Recursive self-reference

In popular culture

Alert reader Mike Rosoft has drawn my attention to the above revision. In his words, "following the advice of xkcd, people started creating an article 'In popular culture.' With an 'in popular culture' section, of course." This is, of course, in reference to 446: Wood.

The article was so popular with xkcd fans that it eventually had to become fully protected (courtesy of Mike himself). It now redirects to "Popular culture," which is also a target of xkcd-related vandalism.

Mike is a member of the Counter-Vandalism Unit, which only sounds like the Counter-Terrorism Unit.

588: Pep Rally

Pep Rally

This is a perfect example of an xkcd that will immediately be converted into Wiki vandalism. If you look at the history, you'll notice multiple attempts to shoehorn the xkcd comic into the article. The edit linked above is particularly great because one user corrects someone's "rally's" with a wonderful "ralliess."

Probably unrelated to xkcd, but I found this edit amusing as well.

(Side note: The final line of the comic still has the extra comma: "Why are we doing this, rally, again?")

446: Wood

There is a rich history of xkcd-related Wikipedia vandalism... just not very much this week. Sometimes the world is not just.

Anyway, let's dig back into the archives. You might remember Wood, the xkcd comic about an "In Popular Culture" section on Wikipedia's "Wood" article. Well, guess what happened after that comic was posted...

"This has nothing to do with xkcd."
"XKCD rules!" You are a terrible person!
The page becomes protected
"XKCD is great; trying to make real life like xkcd isn't necessarily the greatest (http://xkcd.com/325/)." Great quote, appropriate comic.

There are of course pages of awful xkcd-related edits to this page.

Older stuff

Vandalism of Wikipedia in the name of xkcd probably hearkens back to xkcd's earliest comics. This is a non-comprehensive list of edits that predate the blog. Feel free to point out any others in the comments.

637: Scribblenauts
636: Apatosaurus
632: Oregon Trail
633: Harriet the Spy
613: Three-Body Problem
609: TV Tropes
607: Year 2038 problem
603: Idiocracy
593: Voynich manuscript
590: Papyrus



Unrelated to any particular comic:
Pleiades (star cluster), referenced here