Wikipedia Closes Wii, PS3, Sony Entries 99
GameSpot reports that Wikipedia has closed the next-gen console entries because of nigh-onto constant defacement from angry fanbois. From the article: "Last week the complete Nintendo company page was replaced with the phrase "Nintendo Sucks!!!!!!!!!" briefly before the Web site reloaded the original entry. Previous vandalism efforts include someone doodling on a Hitler moustache and horns on the photograph for the entry for Bill Gates, and the sentence "Microsoft is Zomg T3h Suck0r!!!!!!" briefly replacing the computer software company's page. All of the next-generation consoles make it into the company's top 40 list of most revised pages, with the Nintendo Wii at number 10 (12,780 revisions), the PS3 at number 21 (9,894 revisions), and the Xbox 360 at 25 (9,481 revisions.) Interestingly, the Wii seems to attract more conflicts of opinion on the site than the subjects of Scientology (8,475 revisions), God (7,537 revisions), and even Britney Spears (9,886 revisions.)"
The lesson to be learned (Score:2)
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I can see why they reverted it. (Score:5, Funny)
-c.
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This is scary... (Score:4, Funny)
I think I know what console the tabloid writers are going to get.
News? (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:News? (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't find it interesting that a subway car got spray-painted. I would find it interesting that all the subway cars in NYC got vandalized overnight.
Re:News? (Score:5, Informative)
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Old news (Score:2)
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Can you provide any evidence to support this entry?
You just know ... (Score:5, Funny)
See? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:See? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Then again Americans also call Arkansas "Arkensaw" and solder "sodder", and about half of them seem to pronounce the Internet as "Ennernat".
Re:See? (Score:5, Informative)
It is a reference to the guy sitting next to the stage coach driver. That guy carried a shotgun to ward off bad guys. Hence the term.
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Then again Americans also call Arkansas "Arkensaw" and solder "sodder", and about half of them seem to pronounce the Internet as "Ennernat".
You don't even want to know how we pronounce Gruene, Texas or Natchitoches, Louisiana. Or which Elgin in Illinois, Oklahoma, or Texas are pronounced with a hard G or a soft G.
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"XXXX people are funny things. Apparently there's a set of complex rules of pronunciation which are occasionally violated, God only knows how they know what they're saying to each other!"
Whatever country you are from, whatever language you speak, there will be things you say that other native speakers would say differently. In English the semi-regularity of our spelling leads some people to insist that the members of a certain group (Americans, Southerners, Welsh, B
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Needs citation (Score:2)
Stroller.
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But no I ca
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As the internet's last Sega fanboy... (Score:5, Funny)
-Eric
Re:As the internet's last Sega fanboy... (Score:5, Funny)
They didn't lock down the Sega or Dreamcast articles because the Dreamcast is so many orders of magnitude better than all of the other consoles, it's not even worth attempting to dispute. Even trolls are smarter than that, clearly.
The PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360 (listed alphabetically) on the other hand are all pretty close, so there's plenty of argument to be had there.
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Dreamcast WAS made by Sega...
And? What didn't you understand? The PS3 is made by Sony and they get both articles locked anyways.
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What the? (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously. How the hell is this newsworthy? Random vandalism/reverts/locks are a fact of WP, and are far from anything important or new.
Misleading headline (Score:3, Insightful)
To quote Digitiser.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, honestly - why the hell do people think consoles need their loyalty? The companies behind them are out to make cash, which is what corporations do. They have their own marketing budget, people paid loads of cash to sell games and consoles and so forth. And before anyone mentions 'viral marketing', this kind of crap would only serve to put me off buying a console.
Re:To quote Digitiser.. (Score:5, Insightful)
However, there may be a bit of rationality behind it. I remember making fun of atari 400 and sinclair 1000 owners because they didn't have a real keyboard, TI owners for paying too much, and every time I'd meet a fellow commodore owner I'd get all exited and start trading programs. It felt good to find someone else who'd made the same decision that I did, and it had a payoff in terms of being able to trade experiences, techniques, and programs.
It is possible that this kind of behavior makes sense in a way. After all, if everyone owned a Wii there'd be more games for it.
I'll never understand it now that I'm not a kid anymore. I'll also never understand getting in a fight with someone over their religion, country, favorite team, etc., but it happens every day.
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Re:To quote Digitiser.. (Score:4, Insightful)
For the most part, here, you're referring to a group of people here who have great amounts of their personal identity onto their purchase of, and allegiance to, a particular product. This isn't anything new -- or relegated to gamers -- think of the grown men you know who would actively define themselves by their brand of truck. I think that when people are in a situation where they feel that they have no ability to carve out their own indentity -- be it feelings of impotence or just a general lack of creativity -- they will turn to external means to establish who and what they are in the eyes of others.
Quite simply, like any other group which defines shared identity as a similar product choice, or belief in a shared ideology, gamer fanbois are, at the root, confused individuals who are searching for a sense of belonging. There's a large population of the "gamer" population that's, quite frankly, socially awkward. Evangelizing a game system (or a brand of PC, or a genre of music, etc) gives these people an easy way to feel a "connection" with a social group that doesn't require any alteration in the way that they deal with the world or interact with other human beings.
When I was a teenager, I was really into hardcore music for the same reason. My skills of actually holding a conversation were fairly limited, but I knew that I could hang out with my "hardcore friends" or log onto a message board and 'communicate' in the way which I was comfortable. This in and of itself is fairly harmless, but the insular nature of these sort of 'product cliques' will almost always eventually turn to "us against them" codifications as the individuals within the group struggle to establish their own socially hierarchy. In my days as an elitist asshole, it was the 'corporate drones' who would 'actually buy this mass-produced music' that were the de facto topics of my rage. For these kids it's the 'idiots' who would 'actually buy [system].' It's the same motivation in both cases -- a desire for acceptance, at its root.
It diminishes the network effects (Score:2, Insightful)
So Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason I can think of that this happens, immaturity aside, is that young gamers must rely on their parents to buy consoles and their parents probably limit them to one console of choice because of price. This may give the kid a need to prove to himself and others that he got the very best console possible and made the best decision, because if he didn't make the best decision he'll never be able to buy the other console(s) and fix the problem.
Too bad they can't just relax and enjoy the different experiences offered by all the consoles.
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Atari VCS vs Philips Videopac
ZX81 vs Vic 20
Spectrum vs C64
ST vs Amiga
Part of the fun of being a kid is having the energy and enthusiasm to cheer lead the system you own, while dissing the system your best friend's parents bought him instead. It's fun, and just because it's now progressed onto the internet doesn't make it any less harmless then it's ever been.
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Correct. What's sad is the amount of adults that are professional PR for the corporations... but don't get paid for it.
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Re:So Sad (Score:5, Insightful)
Part of the fun of being a parent is teaching you child why they shouldn't be little assholes so they grow out of that phase in their lives eventually. Instead we outlaw discipline, have pep-rallies, endzone celebrations in high-school football games, and encourage childish behaviors right up into early adulthood.
It is not harmless to let your kid be a little brat with no guidance on why it is wrong. Someday they will have to grow up and work with other people instead of having a need to one-up everybody.
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When I was young, it was kind of too coincidental how our families always alway chose competing products.
Beta vs VHS
Preview vs Star (early cable)
Pepsi vs Coke
Atari vs Intellivision
TI994a vs Commodore
Nintendo NES vs Sega Master System
only thing we both liked was Nike.
that spans about 5 years of feuding. I am going to buy PS3 so I am sure he has bought Xbox 360.
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I saw a sig once to the effect that the average slashdot poster is an idiot, and 50% are below average. Certainly a troubling thought, if we're supposed to be an intelligent community, or something. But I think that the truth is that idiots are louder, and poorly conceived and ill-balanced arguments are easier to yell. You may have also noticed this in, say, politics. I imagine most people may have preferences, but a disproportionate percentage
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If you constantly proclaim how the other side sucks, you'll feel like your backing the right horse.
I enjoy owning all the consoles. I get to play any games that are released. It's just the order in which to purchase them that becomes a tough decision for me.
Re:So Sad (Score:4, Insightful)
The most astoundingly stupid argument you can hear in a console X vs. console Y vs. PC debate is hardware. For many people, hardware by itself is everything; it doesn't matter what kind of graphics it produces or what kind of games are available for the platform, as long as the specs are, at the very least, theoretically superior to other platforms. Doesn't matter that Neverwinter Nights 2 looks and runs like shit while several GameCube and Xbox games look a lot better, it only matters that NWN2 is being played on a AMD64 with dual GF 7900s, while the aforementioned consoles have inferior hardware. Doesn't matter that Resident Evil 4 is crazy awesome and looks great, the GameCube's hardware is inferior to the Xbox's, at least on paper. I can't play shit like that, what would people think? Now I can't even play the Xbox because the Xbox 360 is better!
For a real gamer, hardware is just a means to an end (PC), or entirely irrelevant (consoles). Sure, you can be enthusiastic about hardware, but as soon as you start saying shit like "I can't play the GameCube because it has a 485 MHz CPU," you become an asshat.
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Two sides of the story (Score:1)
I think this just proves... (Score:1)
Seriously guys, go and get angry about something WORTH getting angry about
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Price? (obvious) Games? (obvious) Availability? (will very soon be obvious) It is a slow day coming until the weekend.
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I can understand people getting <b>annoyed</b> about stuff related to them, but angry? People are getting onto shakey ground (personality wise) if they really are getting angry about which console "rulz".
It's also a shame that some console owners feel the need to deface a public resource to validate the choice they made in the "war".
It's a shame more people don't get angry enough to get off their arses to go and vote. Or get angry about the other dozens of issu
I'll never understand solo-system fanboys (Score:1)
Reliability (Score:2)
Now I love Wikipedia and think it represents the future of... stuff, and all, and I definitely think it's a good and legitimate place to do research, but this quote implies that those fears went away. If fact, the number or people vocalizing these fears have been growing since the
"Closed"? No. (Score:2)
PCs for teh win! (Score:2)
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This isn't news (Score:2)
The best scenario (Score:1)
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If all the consoles appeared equal, and there were no clear winners (based on whatever criteria a given fanboi was using), they would be confused and not know who to ide