An interesting blast from the past. I don't think The Onion would write the same piece today because it doesn't accord with people's experiences of Wikipedia. As an editor, I see dozens of instances of vandalism per week, but as a reader I might notice a couple per month—and many of those I only spot because of years of experience in seeing the telltale signs. I think the go-to joke about Wikipedia today is the hackneyed and disruptive "I edited it to say [X ridiculous thing]", or (less bad) a faked screenshot of an article changed. The joke here is implicitly the opposite of The Onion's piece: Wikipedia is an authoritative source and the juxtaposition with the reminder that anyone can change it is funny. With all due respect, I believe Adam and Ben have been proven wrong, firstly with the success of Wikipedia and secondly with the failure of all of Larry Sanger's attempted spin-off wikis. But it's interesting to see that as late as 2006, five years into the project, there was still such dispute about how Wikipedia should be written. Though, of course, forcing registered accounts or (more rarely) identity authentication remain perennial proposals. — Bilorv (talk) 23:50, 2 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Skimming through Sanger's article, I was rather surprised to discover that the word "blogosphere" was still being used unironically as recently as 2019. On the other hand, the fact that he fell into the blockchain morass is totally unsurprising to me. Lots of smart people fell for that. --NYKevin 09:14, 26 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know many smart people who fell for the blockchain pyramid scheme. I know smart people who recognised they could be at the top of the pyramid, and people who joined the bottom of the pyramid because they believe themselves to be very smart. — Bilorv (talk) 18:51, 26 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]
