People on Wikipedia Spent Weeks Arguing About a Picture of a Cow

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Using a camera, 3 bottles of beer and a computer, this article was recently turned into a video. If seeing a pasty British guy lose his shit while talking about people slowly pushing cows over, you can find the text version of the article below.

According to experts, Wikipedia is roughly about as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica which is amazing when you realise that all it takes to ruin an article is one person being an asshole. However, sometimes Wikipedia is home to some frankly bizarre edit wars that are neither malicious or purposeful, like the time editors spent ages arguing about the caption to put below a cow.

The arguments, which took place on the Wikipedia page for Cow Tipping erupted when someone uploaded the following picture of a cow.

Moooo.
Moooo.

And then captioned it “a potential unsuspecting victim?“.

Now if you’re assuming that the arguments that arose focussed on whether it was appropriate to have a joke caption on what is supposed to be a purely factual website, you’re giving the internet way too much credit. No, instead what Wikipedia editors took exception to was the fact that the cow couldn’t possibly be an unsuspecting victim because “it’s awake” and “looking at the camera” during daytime. Almost as if they felt that the guy who took the photo was attempting to sneak up on the cow.

Then, because the internet is a fucking beautiful place sometimes, several other editors piled on to argue that the cow actually could be classified as an unsuspecting victim because as a cow, it has no concept of what cow tipping is, and thus would always be unsuspecting, even if it could see the person running towards it with their hands outstretched.

Now if this happened once, it would be a humorous footnote in a longer article, but after some genius changed the photo on the page to this:

Mooo?
Mooo?

And once again captioned it, “An unsuspecting victim” the exact same argument happened again! With some insufferable assholes trying to remove the caption on the grounds that it was impossible to prove the cow was unsuspecting and therefore had to be deleted because “Wikipedia doesn’t publish unverifiable claims“, which couldn’t have been a more dickish way of trying to make a point if it was written in snow with piss.

In the end, this argument about this singular, non-issue so insignificant it’s size could be measured in mouse pubes, needed 7000 words (14 times the length of this very article) to reach a  satisfactory conclusion and by satisfcatory we mean an editor stepped in, said “fuck it” and changed the picture to one of a cow lying down.

So the next time you spend an hour on Facebook and feel like you may have wasted your time, remember that a dozen people once spent weeks arguing about whether a cow looked like chill enough to sneak up on.