One of the fun fringe events at Build in Belfast was The Standardistas’ Open Book Exam:
Unlike the typical quiz, the Open Book Exam demands the use of iPhones, iPads, Androids—even Zunes—to avail of the internet’s wealth of knowledge, required to answer many of the formidable questions.
Team Clearleft came joint third. Initially it was joint fourth but an obstreperous Andy Budd challenged the scoring.
Now one of the principles of this unusual pub quiz was that cheating was encouraged. Hence the encouragement to use internet-enabled devices to get to Google and Wikipedia as quickly as the network would allow. In that spirit, Andy suggested a strategy of “running interference.”
So while others on the team were taking information from the web, I created a Wikipedia account to add misinformation to the web.
Again, let me stress, this was entirely Andy’s idea.
The town of Clover, South Carolina ceased being twinned Larne and became twinned with Belfast instead.
The world’s largest roller coaster become 465 feet tall instead of its previous 456 feet (requiring a corresponding change to a list page).
But the moment I changed the entry for Keyboard Cat to alter its real name from “Fatso” to “Freddy” …BAM! Instant revert.
You can mess with geography. You can mess with measurements. But you do. Not. Mess. With. Keyboard Cat.
For some good clean Wikipedia fun, you can always try wiki racing:
To Wikirace, first select a page off the top of your head. Using “Random page” works well, as well as the featured article of the day. This will be your beginning page. Next choose a destination page. Generally, this destination page is something very unrelated to the beginning page. For example, going from apple to orange would not be challenging, as you would simply start at the apple page, click a wikilink to fruit and then proceed to orange. A race from Jesus Christ to Subway (restaurant) would be more of a challenge, however. For a true test of skill, attempt Roman Colosseum to Orthographic projection.
Then there’s the simple pleasure of getting to Philosophy:
Some Wikipedia readers have observed that clicking on the first link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets you to the Philosophy article.
Seriously. Try it.