Herpderpedia is a Front Row Seat to the Confusion Surrounding the Wikipedia Blackout

When I first read that the Wikipedia blackout was happening, I wished that I could just pull a up lawn chair on the Wikipedia homepage and spend the day watching the bewildered faces of everyone who had no clue what was going on as they lashed out in anger, fear, and frustration. Now, thanks to @herpderpedia, I can. And so can you.

The hero behind @herpderpedia is performing a simple but important public service: Trolling the trending topics, something I am loathe to do, and retweeting bewildered responses to the Wikipedia blackout, ostensibly the best ones because they are getting more hilarious by the minute.

Of course, there’s a little more to it than pure tourism. For one, it’ll raise your blood pressure a little because so many people not only don’t know what’s going on — which is fine, that’s why Wikipedia decided to do this — but because so many people go and ask about it on Twitter instead of reading the very unsubtle splash page on Wikipedia itself. Although in their defense, Wikipedia requires you do the arduous task of clicking a link and then reading if you want to know what’s going on.

On the lighter side, the @herpdepedia stream is a game of sorts. So many of the tweets cut so close to the bone as to read as parody. Admittedly, some of them actually are parody. 99% of the ones mentioning soap, for instance. Depending on how cynical you are, it’s a game of varying difficulty to guess which ones are real and which ones you need to believe are fake in order to keep your faith in humanity. Basically, it’s like reading down any given trending topic. All that being said, I posted some of my favorites below to give you an idea. Heads up: Hilarious profanity ahead.

(via @herpderpedia)

• Redditors probably know why reddit is down
• And Google’s contribution is somewhat less obtrusive

Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com

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Eric Limer