Wikipedia is still very much the domain for longwinded parsings of the esoteric, if not completely hallucinated bullshit, a lot of it depending on how motivated that subject's fanboy corps is. Who's gonna show up more, Q-Bert's fans, or President James Buchanan?

Games Radar has put together a list showing the truly distorted priorities of Wikipedia editors and writers, if length is a useful metric. And I think it is. Because according to their analysis, Knuckles from fucking Sonic the Hedgehog gets 7,832 words, and God — yes, that Guy — rates 3,726. There are 14 other hilarious comparisons (Call of Duty vs. World War II; Electronic Gaming Monthly vs Time, etc.) So get out there and start padding entries that really matter: Niko Bellic's (385 words).

The WTF World of Wikipedia [Games Radar]

Besides, every real Halo fan knows that Halo 3 cannot truly be beaten until the 2500s when Bungie's historical video game prophecies come to pass. Freakin' Wikipedia idiots.

UPDATE: Ahh, apparently this is clever cultural commentary based upon actual fact/Bungie glitches! Damn we love Wikipedians and their wit.

Ah, Wikipedia [wonderland]

While it's unclear at just what level the user editing the Wikipedia entry was employed, it's clear that the editor has a bone to pick with the Xbox 360 and someone named Mike. In an entry for Tomb Raider Anniversary, the same IP wrote "Not on the Xbox 360, IN YOUR FACE MIKE!" There are multiple edits to the God of War II entry, the entries for Mike and Michael and the entry for the term Jockey. References to jockeying (instead of controlling) are made throughout a period of edits.

The editor using SCEE Liverpool's IP also weighed in on Hideo Kojima with one edit, simply adding "PS Kojima is nuts!"

Hey, who here loves the internet? It's great, isn't it?

Sony insults Halo 3 on Wikipedia [N4G, thanks to the billions that sent this in!]

Shacknews cites a revision comparison from November 2006, which shows the old and revised listings side by side, highlighting changes made by the EA IP address. Trip Hawkins name is removed from the important people listing as well as several places within the text. Whole paragraphs of criticism have been excised. One of my personal favorites:

Electronic Arts has from time to time been criticized for its employment policy of requiring employees to work extraordinarily long hours—up to 80 hours per week—as a general rule and not just at "crunch" times leading up to the scheduled releases of products.

Electronic Arts has led the industry in reforming work/life balance issues that are endemic to the software industry.

The changes and source were discovered by Shacknews using Virgil Giffith's Wikipedia Scanner, which references anonymous entry editor IP addresses to a WHOIS IP lookup. They determined that the IP address in question is responsible for a third of the Wikipedia changes made from the Redwood offices, which tells us this is either someone in the company assigned Wikipedia editing duty or someone doing this on their own with far too much time on their hands. Unlikely, but possible.

As a daily user of Wikipedia, this doesn't surprise me in the least. On a daily basis companies and individuals have to monitor their entries to make sure no biased or inaccurate information gets added to their listing. They're just not supposed to be adding it.

EA Staffer Attempts to Alter Wiki History [Shacknews]

By: Brian Crecente

Wikipedia turned the concept of research and encyclopedias on its head, making readers into writers and the once static text of a encyclopedic tomb into something up-to-the-second timely. And now, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales wants to do the same thing for gaming reference books. Giving game FAQs, walkthroughs and nuanced details a place to live on Wikia.

"Imagine a traditional encyclopedia, that's Wikipedia," Wikipedia founder and Wikia co-founder Jimmy Wales, 40, told me in a recent interview. "Then think about all of the rest of the library, every other kind of book or work, (Wikia) is basically that. Specialized books."

Wikia was founded in 2004 growing steadily into an online research site home to more than 3,000 wiki communities in 70 languages, the largest of which, by far, is the one dedicated to gaming, Wales said.

"As we've watched the growth of the Wikia, what's fueling that growth is the gaming communities, which we didn't anticipate," he said. "A couple of months ago at our board meeting we discussed this, this is obviously something we haven't recognized going in that is clearly important."

Currently the Gaming Wikia is home to tens of thousands of articles about nearly 500 different games and gaming subjects. The entries range from the mammoth (the World of Warcraft wiki sports more than 31,000 articles and the Halopedia has about 2,500) to the minuscule (the entry for Yohoho is six sentences long).

But Wales is hoping to expand the Gaming Wikia dramatically. This E3 he will be meeting with developers to try and get the word out about the free site and how its community-fueled knowledge base can help promote their games. In return he hopes to get them more involved.

"We want to get known more in the gaming industry," Wales said. "Basically, we want to form relationships there, and see how we can work with the gaming companies to do things like get materials for the communities to be able to work with. We are ad supported so that's also why we want to get to know the companies."

Eventually, Wales hopes that the Gaming Wikia will become a place where entries are created and communities built before a game ships. But he doesn't see his site as competition with the likes of Brady Games or Gamefaqs.

"I'm not sure if we're competition or not," he said. "I think we are more competition for some of those smaller forums. It's like asking if Wikipedia is competition for CNN."

I asked Wales about the in-fighting that can often happen on Wikipedia, sometimes marring entries. (For instance a banned Kotaku reader successfully campaigned to delete my Wiki entry, which I didn't create, but was home, for a brief spell, to a rumor that I killed prostitutes.).

Wales doesn't see that becoming a problem in the often polarized world of gaming fandom.

"To some extent when you have an open forums people get into arguments, but by and large it is not the place for that sort of thing."

Wales seems to have a good game plan, already he's having his tech people look at creating tools that would make creating things like walkthroughs easier, he's added support for YouTube videos and is workig on both WYSYWYG support and more robust voting functionality. He even has a policy that prohibits taking ad revenue from gold farmers.

"Basically what we've decided to do is we ban all gold farming ads," he said. "It costs us some money, but it seems to be something that the community is really keen on. It's a tricky area, you want the ads to be relevant, on the other hand if the relevancy comes at the expense of the community's core values it just doesn't work."

The way Wales sees it, the biggest interest for the gaming Wikia will likely come from massively multiplayer online games. An area where printed guides can quickly become outdated.

"As gaming moves more into the MMO realm of things, things can change quickly in a game, either socially or in the program, which means that up-to-date information is more important," he said. "If you had a definitive guide to Doom back in the day, it is what it is, but with things like Lord of the Rings Online or WoW it's a moving target at all times."

And from the looks of the World of Warcraft wiki, the Wikia is keeping up, it even has its own easter eggs.

Gaming Wikia [Wikia]

The man who brought us Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is bringing us an "open-source magazine" about video games called "Gaming Wikia." Actually, there are four of these Wikia "magazines" — Music, cars, health and, as previously mentioned, games. Wired's Chris Kohler puts it best: Think NeoGAF, but run amock and with the abilities to edit content. Says company V.P. Dan Lewis,

The 'open-source magazines' we're unveiling today are focused largely around topics where passionate people have already started collaborating online. The launch of Tunes, Cars, Gaming and Health is a continuation of our mission to open-source the creation and development of content around every topic imaginable—so we are obviously not stopping here.

User generated content matters. Just take a look at our comments section. I'm curious to see how this pans out, though. Could be fantastic. Or not. Brian Ashcraft

Wikia Gaming "Mag" Press Release [Game|Life via 1Up]

Tired of the common "Nintendo Sucks!!!!!!!!1"-esque edits to Wikipedia entries for console manufacturers Sony and Nintendo, Wikipedia has disabled the editing of both companies' internet encyclopedia entries, presumably until either both of their respective consoles launch. Or until the cross section of internet power users and video game enthusiasts mature, whichever comes first.

I've got my money (all of it) on the former beating the latter.

Possibly as a preventitive measure, Microsoft has also seen their Wikipedia entry locked down, in an effort to keep entries that read "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" and feature perspiration saturated pics of company angry-man Steve Ballmer to a minimum.

No word on whether an entry on J Allard's hoodies will also be disabled. Michael McWhertor

Wikipedia closes Wii, PS3, Sony entries [Gamespot]

I hope for Nintendo's sake that the Coke-bottle bespectacled fungineers at Google update their search suggestion spell-checker before the November launch. Right now, looking for news on the Wii asks if you're really interested in reading about is World War II. And thinking about Nazi's and the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki just take the fun out of accessible console gaming.

Come on, Google, help a multi-billion dollar Japanese corporation out!

Wikipedia on the other hand, that's where people are going for news. According to the newly launched WikiCharts, Nintendo's Wii is just barely being beaten out by gay porn stars and oral sex. Here were the top ten accessed pages at time of publish.

1. Main Page
2. Wikipedia
3. Pluto
4. List of gay porn stars
5. Oral sex
6. Wii
7. United States
8. List of Digimon
9. David Bowie
10. The Simpsons

Go, Nintendo, go! Thanks, Yannik! Michael McWhertor

Wii vs WWII
WikiCharts

Currently flagged as questionably neutral over at Wikipedia, the List of Video Games Considered The Worst Ever may not be an authoritative, judgmentally ascetic resource of bad games to be passed down via ebony marble time capsule to future generations, but it sure as hell is a lot of fun to read.

For example, this snippet describing Dangerous Vaults:

The game epitomizes many common design flaws such as extremely poorly made 3D graphics, problematic controls, ridiculous premises, with the most obvious being that it is a poor clone of the Tomb Raider games and a poor excuse for seeing Lara Croft raped in various situations. The player controls Tara through a jungle, where she can easily be injured by just moving around or, more frequently, from being raped by various creatures such as gorillas, 3-meter tall tribesmen and giant lizards

And that's where the questionable neutrality comes in. "Worst game ever?" Come on... best game ever is more like it. Rape, of course, isn't funny... unless it involves Lara Croft and a horny Tyrannosaurus Rex flaunting a saurian erection. Florian Eckhardt

List of video games considered the worst ever [Wikipedia]

While gaming's successes are fun to play, the abject failures are more fun to talk about. Enter Wikipedia's entry, 'The List of Commercial Failures in Computer and Video Gaming', which covers in excruciatingly compelling communal details all the games that landed with a big, wet splat, for practically ever system under the sun.

Our good buddy Trespasser is there, for one:

The game employed a unique but unwieldy interface in which the player controlled Anne's right arm and had to look down at a tattoo on her breast to determine her health level (not very practical in a combat situation).

And you checked your inventory by reaching inside Anne's crotch and pulling out keys! Florian Eckhardt

List of Major Commercial Failures in Computer and Video Gaming [Wikipedia]

Pop Culture References in Warcraft [Wikipedia]