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Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction? returns once again with a legendary guest Eric Fking Andre! To promote his newest movie, Bad Trip, the chaotic comic spoke with us to prove and disprove whats written about him on Wikipedia.

Ever listen to Blarf? Before Eric Andre assumed his Ronald McDonald-esque alter ego, he formed the experimental music project while at the Berklee College of Music. And just like it says on Wikipedia, its true that one of Blarfs early band members quit over a song called I Love Abortions because his very religious wife didnt approve.

He was a nice guy, Andre says. They were like, the couple that was married at 18 and they were from a podunk, Possum Ridge, Arkansas kind of thing. I put that song I Love Abortion on the demo of the music I wanted to play on purpose, cause I was like, Im gonna make offensive lyrics, so only join the band if youre okay with doing Frank Zappa-esque, Trey Parker, Matt Stone edgy lyrical content. Then he signed up for the band and he gave me shit about the song!

Andre proclaims, however, that Wikipedia is incorrect about getting Exhumed on The Eric Andre Show only because Pig Destroyer were unavailable. I think we just reached out to a handful of metal bands with metal cache and Exhumed responded first. I remember reaching out to Agoraphobic Nosebleed I love them, theyre one of my favorites. Theyre so cool, theyre so unique. They have a special place in my heart.

And as for Flava Flavs claim that Hannibal Buress didnt actually kick him in the face during an Eric Andre Show taping, Andre himself says, Hannibal kicked him in the motherfucking face. Knocked his ass out and hed do it again.

Watch the Eric Andre edition of Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction? above and be sure to watch the hilarious Bad Trip on Netflix, dropping March 26.

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Eric Andre Raves About Grindcore While Playing 'Wikipedia: Fact or Fiction?' - Loudwire

Wikipedia is God. Launched on 15 January 2001, the digital encyclopedia exists in 300 languages around the world and literally contains everything you could ever need to know. Would any of us have made it through school essays if it werent for the wisdom contained within? Probably not. Wikipedia is the best place on the internet, says 21-year-old Annie Rauwerda. Its collaborative and constructive in a way that makes it feel like a vestige of a bygone Internet era. I get so excited when I remember that the sum of human knowledge is available for everyone, for free. Isnt that exciting? It should be celebrated every day! Strangers online came together to organise all of the known information in the universe for you! Well, when you put it like that!

A longtime fan (she did a lot of wikiracing in middle school), during the first lockdown last spring, Annie found herself as one often does deep down several Wiki-holes. With nothing else to do, the Brooklyn-based Neuroscience student from Michigan decided to document the weird, wild and curious corners of the site she was uncovering. I was surprised there wasnt already an Instagram hub for weird Wikipedia articles, so I made the account one night. 160k people (including John Mayer) are very glad she did. Its approaching one year now since Annie shared her first post as @depthsofwikipedia one documenting the scientific research into how riding Disneys Big Thunder Mountain helped patients pass their kidney stones and over 400 posts later, shes brought Dicktown, chess on a really big board and cat nuns into the lives of fans.

Annie typically spends about 10 hours a week running the account, both trawling Wiki for weirdness and wading through suggestions sent in by dedicated followers. I get a lot of submissions these days, so I dont hunt for articles in the wild quite as much, but I still stay busy in comments and stories and maintaining the operations of merch sales, she tells us. About that if you, too, are keen to get your favourite depthsofwikipedia post in mug form (with half of all proceeds helping to fund Wikimedia Education) youre in luck.

If TikTok is more your bag, Annie shares highlights on there too. And if youre struggling to manage your own incessant urge to consume bizarre content from the depths of websites, Annie recently teamed up with her best friend Hajin to create @depthsofamazon. As their bio clearly states, posts endorsement of Amazons labor practices this is a safe place to chuckle at unhinged reviews without actually giving your time and money to the dark overlord of digital marketplaces.

Fascinated by her work, we asked Annie to compile and break down what she believes might just be the 10 weirdest things from the depths of Wikipedia. Find enlightenment below.

1. My Way Killings

There have been a number of deaths as a result of karaoke rage in the Philippines, including certain renditions of My Way by Frank Sinatra that were so bad people resorted to murder.

2. List of people who have lived in airports

I imagine it's like a layover that lasts for years. Motivations for living in the airports seem to range from 'ran out of money for a flight' to 'wanted to smoke and drink without his family bothering him.

3. Hedgehogs dilemma

It's a metaphor for the challenges of human intimacy. As much as hedgehogs want to move close together, they must remain distant to avoid poking each other with their sharp spines. It sounds like quarantine.

4. Small penis rule

When writers create characters inspired by someone in real life, this rule suggests they give the character a small penis in order to avoid libel lawsuits. The logic is that nobody would want to publicly say, That character with the small penis is actually me.

5. List of entertainers who have died during a performance

One actor, who played a character who died of a heart attack, died of a real heart attack between his scenes in a 1958 theatre performance. An 1897 Metropolitan Opera performer received a loud ovation after collapsing mid-performance, as the audience believed the event to be a stroke of brilliant acting. This article contains over a hundred more examples of bizarre occurrences like this.

6. List of sexually active popes

This one is a classic, and it's exactly what it sounds like. The article is surprisingly long and I learn a bunch of new pope facts every time I revisit it.

7. Sweater curse

Knitters hold a documented suspicion that knitting a sweater for a significant other will lead to the recipient breaking up with the knitter. Proposed solutions include waiting for marriage or starting with socks.

8. Animals with fraudulent diplomas

Certain pet owners have displayed the lax standards of diploma mills or otherwise fraudulent academic institutions by putting their dogs and cats through degree programs. Just because something looks like a diploma doesn't mean that someone has responsible training there's a pug with a bogus MBA.

9. Scunthorpe problem

As recently as October 2020, a filter blocked the word 'bone' during an online palaeontology conference. Poorly-designed profanity filters have created all sorts of issues, and this article documents dozens of them.

10. Timeline of the far future

In 20,000 years, only about one of every hundred core words will remain in use in future languages. The mind-boggling predictions continue all the way up to the proposed time for quantum efforts to generate a new Big Bang one trillion years from now.

Follow i-D on Instagram and TikTok for more weird internet stuff.

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This Instagram account dug up the weirdest things on Wikipedia - i-D

Wikipedias parent company has announced it is to begin charging major technology companies to access the online encyclopaedias vast trove of knowledge.

The Wikipedia Enterprise initiative will launch later this year and could see the likes of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon paying fees to access content theyve been using without traditional compensation for years.

Until now, the burden has been on benevolent Wikipedia users to keep the non-profit Wikipedia Foundation via donations of which the aforementioned firms are often among but now the balance will be redressed by tech giants and, eventually, smaller companies.

Wikimedia Enterprise is a new product from the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, the foundation says. Wikimedia Enterprise provides paid developer tools and services that make it easier for companies and organisations to consume and re-use Wikimedia data.

Related: Best VPN

The new initiative was announced on Tuesday and came to light via a Wired report, which revealed conversations are ongoing between Wikimedia and a number of tech giants whore already in discussions over an agreement.

This is the first time the foundation has recognised that commercial users are users of our service, says Wikimedia Foundation senior director Lane Becker in an interview. Weve known they are there, but we never really treated them as a user base.

Apple, for example, leverages Wikipedia for Siris knowledge bank, but currently doesnt officially pay for that content. It does match employee donations to Wikipedia though.

Amazon uses the tech for Alexa and donated $1 million in 2018. Google, who heavily leverages results from Wikipedia in Search while using excepts in its knowledge boxes, donated $2 million in 2019. Facebook also chucked in a million in 2018. Its not clear how regular those donations have been since.

Do you think its time Big Tech started footing the bill for Wikipedia? Will it help to secure the non-profit companys future? Let us know @trustedreviews on Twitter.

Chris Smith is a freelance technology journalist for a host of UK tech publications, includingTrusted Reviews. He's based in South Florida, USA.

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Big Tech firms are facing a big bill from Wikipedia heres why - TrustedReviews

Id never thought much about Wikipedia until its pages started appearing high up in Google searchesand not just Google. If you ask Siri or Alexa a question, chances are the source of your answer will be Wikipedia too. Hundreds of AI platforms use Wikipedia data; machine learning trains on it. So if women are missing there, they will be missing elsewhere as well.

Women in science went missing long before Wiki, of coursein press coverage, top billing at meetings, appearance on panels. They werent much on my radar either when I first started writing about science decades ago and showed up for the March meeting of the American Physical Society. The March meeting is nerd mecca: Close to 10,000 physicists gather to present findings in condensed matter, which is everything from quantum computers to lasers to smart materials. AI and nano everything.

A friendly Black woman noticed my obvious confusion and helped guide me through the maze of talks, panels, sessions. She was Shirley Ann Jackson, who I later learned was the first Black woman to get a doctorate in theoretical physics from MIT (where, she said, she was mistaken for a maid). She took me to the reception for women in physics. I was seriously wowed. A lot more physicists were women (and vice versa) than I ever imagined. Where had they been? Where had I been?

Decades later, I had a similar wake-up call at an exclusive meeting in Aspen of top physicists in what was then known as string theorytackling the most fundamental questions of space, time, energy, stuff. I expected that a lot of the material would be exotic and unfamiliar. What really seemed exotic and unfamiliar were the three Black men among the small elite group.

For most people, the description theoretical physicist doesnt immediately conjure an image of a Black person. (Neil de Grasse Tyson is great, but one example doesnt count, and hes not a part of this particular tribe anyway.) After the Aspen meeting, my ground truth shifted. I could picture Black men as theoretical physicists no problem because Id met them, interviewed them, hung out.

Then it struck me: Just about every female physicist I know, and every Black physicist I know, are people I met in person. I hadnt even noticed their absence until their presence hit me in face.

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My portals arent so diverse. Which is why Wikipedia in the age of corona had me worried.

A lot of people say they use Wikipedia only as a starting point, a first reference. After all, everyone knows that its crowdsourced. Its proudly non-expert. A community of editors ultimately arbitrates whats in, whats out, what matters, whats true. Because there are so many of them (250,000 edits a day, according to one source), the idea is truth will out.

Yet Wikipedias top ranking on Google gives it credibility and authority that misrepresents what it isa community consensus. This is a problem, according to Atilus, a leading digital marketing company. During an audit for a client using prime SEO software, Atilus found Wikipedia at or near the top over and over again, frequently with a prominent sidebar. On its blog, Atilus posed a not-always-hypothetical question to illustrate the problem: Would you rather trust a doctor whos undergone rigorous training or people who spend time in health-related chatrooms or an intern who blogs about heart health? Thats a big oversimplification, given that Wiki entries are supposed to be double-sourced and edited. But even when that works, its not even close to ground truth.

Granted, Wikipedia isnt the only source of content thats creeps into everything, ubiquitous and unavoidable. It could be your mom or The New York Times. What gives Wikipedia a central place in data heaven is that popular algorithms that lead us around by the nose go to the site to learn. AI reinforces whatever biases are put in front of them. Big data processes codify the past, writes Cathy ONeil in her book Weapons of Math Destruction.

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The Shaky Ground Truths of Wikipedia - WIRED

The Donald Trump era might have come and gone, but the age of disinformation is here to stay. What was already a humming misinformation machine before 2016 has, over the past five years, developed into a world-building juggernaut capable of reshaping economies, politics and social structures. Paired with the constant downsizing and shuttering of local, regional and even national media, this evolution has put a premium on trustworthy and easily accessible information.

This is the faltering information ecosystem into which Wikimedia Foundation CEO and executive director Katherine Maher stepped in June 2016. Wikimedia, which oversees Wikipedia along with Wiktionary, Wikiquote and other projects, is the collective name for a global movement that aims to harness the collaborative power of the internet by creating and sharing free knowledge in a variety of forms.

Maher, who will leave her post this spring, has spent the last five years shepherding Wikipedia and its non-profit organization through these turbulent contexts. During that time, Wikipedias readership has shot up 30 per cent, and the foundation has doubled its annual budget. The organization also introduced a universal code of conduct for participation in Wiki projects and increased its number of monthly active editors. During a time of media austerity, these are not small feats.

To top it off, despite hosting one of the worlds most popular websites, Wikimedia maintains a miniscule carbon footprint by keeping its focus on text rather than images. Wikipedias climate change articles remain some of the sites most deeply sourced and extensively cited works.

But how much vigilance is required now to sustain an enormous digital resource hub that anyone can edit? How has Wikipedia the global go-to reference that relies on volunteer editorial contributions dealt with an increasingly resourceful disinformation movement?

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Join Maher as she discusses these things and more with Canadas National Observer founder and editor-in-chief Linda Solomon Wood for a Conversations event on March 18 at 7 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. PT. Reserve your spot here, and send potential questions ahead of the event to [emailprotected].

Maher has had a front-row seat to the global fight against disinformation, but its hardly her first rodeo. Prior to her station with Wikimedia, she worked with various NGOs and non-profits to advocate for better information economies, free and open governance, and civic engagement. Alongside Wikimedia, her resume includes UNICEF, the World Bank and the National Democratic Institute.

With her Wikimedia tenure coming to an end in April, this Conversations event promises a relevant retrospective on the state of public media and disinformation since 2016.

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Wikimedia CEO Katherine Maher on how Wikipedia fights disinformation - National Observer