A plea for some crowd-sourcing, which might be fun

I have been researching the history of encyclopedias. Producing an encyclopedia involves a number of obstacles, one of which is the decision of what to include: you want the encyclopedia to cover everything, but obviously it can’t, so you have to choose what is important enough to merit inclusion. (The Encyclopedia Brittanica, for instance, has an entry for DARWIN, CHARLES, but it doesn’t include Darwin’s shoe size or what he ate for breakfast on his 42nd birthday, etc.) But now, with Wikipedia, there is no shortage of space, and there can be articles on pretty much everything, though editors still make calls about what merits inclusion and what doesn’t. (There isn’t an article on me, for example {sniff}.) Still, there are plenty of articles on smaller or more trivial matters that one wouldn’t expect to find in a traditional encyclopedia. So, for example, check out this lengthy article on SHOE SIZE.

I’ll bet that you can find other surprising entries – so here’s my plea for some crowd-sourcing: What is the most trivial entry you can find on Wikipedia? Just leave it as a comment to this post.

Author: Huenemann

Curious about the ways humans use their minds and hearts to distract themselves from the meaninglessness of life. View all posts by Huenemann