Wikipedia is a vast wealth of knowledge, where people go to fact check and learn about history, science, and so much more. It's also where anyone and everyone who has an account can join in sharing knowledge... or things that are completely untrue and ridiculous.
In a post on Ask Reddit, sifsand said:
What was the most unusual Wikipedia article you found?
There's a wide array of Wikipedia articles from all over the world that share information on topics we never knew we wanted until now.
Here's a few of the most unusual articles people could find.
Holiday is Sweden
"Gävle goat. It's this giant wicker holiday goat in Sweden that has a weird tradition of being destroyed by vandals every winter. It's so bad that the people that construct it even have backup goats for when the original eventually meets a fiery death. There's a list of all the goat's 'deaths.' Some deaths are like spy thrillers."
"Is that the f*cking thing that got security around it and someone shot it with an incendiary arrow and set it fire that way since they couldn't get close?"
- tdub2217
"Burnt by unknown vandals reportedly dressed as Santa and the gingerbread man, by shooting a flaming arrow at the goat."
Cats out of the bag
"Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched by the Central Intelligence Agency Directorate of Science & Technology, which in the 1960s intended to use cats to spy on the Kremlin and Soviet embassies. In an hour-long procedure a veterinary surgeon implanted a microphone in the cat's ear canal, a small radio transmitter at the base of its skull and a thin wire into its fur..."
"The first Acoustic Kitty mission was to eavesdrop on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and allegedly killed by a taxi almost immediately."
Complete and utter lies
"I'm unsure if this is technically classified as an article itself, but this Wikipedia page on notable Wikipedia hoaxes is one of my personal favorites. Some people have gone to so much effort to try and create fake articles and some of them have survived on the site for over a decade before being found out."
"On a fictional British TV show from the 70s:"
"In a Christmas show, Dale dressed as Adolf Hitler shouted the first lines to ever appear in the show, with the words "Achtung Juden!", which caused outrage and shock in what was still a liberal television age;"
Personal recounts of a monumental explosion
"A meteor blew up over Siberia in the early 20th century. The personal accounts of it happening are insane."
"'I lost my senses for a moment' was a personal favourite."
A list of sexually active Popes
"List of sexually active Popes"
"The pope's son would typically be raised by one of his siblings as his nephew', and when he came of age, would get a cushy position in the Church. The Latin word for nephew is nepos, which is where we get the word 'nepotism'."
Jewish people in the porn industry
"jews in the porn industry in the US."
"I only found it in my native language but apperantly it is a thing, we jews are overrepresented there like in hollywood and the banks (because we were historically forbidden from having normal agriculture works) and it causes a lot of conspiracy theorists to claim jews have a secret plan to use porn to make the world stop having children."
The most unusual deaths
"Draco, an Athenian lawmaker, was reportedly smothered to death by gifts of cloaks and hats showered upon him by appreciative citizens at a theatre on Aegina."
"Well sh!t"
- sifsand
"I thought everyone in ancient Athens wore togas, what type of cloaks and hats are we even talking about here? Are they special 'congratulating important politician' clothes that they only carried around for ceremonial purposes?"
The most bizarre soccer match
"That time when two soccer teams realized that it would be advantageous to score an own goal. Both teams wind up trying to defend each other's goals. Chaos ensues."
"It came about from bizarre tournament rules that gave teams a two-goal margin of victory should they win in sudden death overtime."
"It wasn't that both teams needed to score an own goal (that would've been funny, but not that bad as they basically just flip the field). Instead, at different points in the game it was advantageous for both teams (one after the other) to score an own goal. The first own goal was just to tie the game. In the second, the other team needed to either score a goal or an own goal. Either option would give them the result they needed (a win or a loss by exactly 1 point), so for a few minutes at the end of regular time the opposing team was defending both goals at the same time."
More impressive than weird
"The Austrian Dieter Macek made a family tree of the whole Greek mythology. It includes 5771 gods and heroes. The genealogy is 73m/240ft long and he spent 33 years of private efforts on it."
"the Wikipedia article (only available in German)"
"a panorama shot of the poster"
"the whole family tree digitally"
- ZieII
Giving 'interior decorating' a new meaning
"Skulls and bones that constitute the interior decorations of a Czech ossuary"
"The ossuary is estimated to contain the skeletons of between 40,000 and 70,000 people, whose bones have, in many cases, been artistically arranged to form decorations and furnishings for the chapel."
"Here's an article"
These articles are all over the map, but what a lesson learned. That's the beauty of the internet.
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