Fun with Wikipedia "Random Article"

Wikipedia is amazing, a wonder. So what if some of the information is suspect? It's still fascinating what people take the time to enter into this online encyclopedia. My friend recently opened my eyes to the "random article" feature. It's a good way to see what's out there in WikiWorld. Here are the first five results when I hit "random article" this morning.

1) Pied Piper (Comics) 625 words on a DC comics supervillian that you have never heard of. Why would someone ever search for this information? I don't know, but is was kind of interesting.

2) Seal's Rock The author must live here because who cares?

3) Barry Yelverton, 5th Viscount Avonmore - Sadly, of all the Barrys I could have gotten, I didn't get Barry Lyndon, Barry White, or Barry Williams.

4) Ordo Dracul - "The Ordo Dracul is one of the five covenants in the World of Darkness role-playing game Vampire: The Requiem published by White Wolf." Got that?

5) Earthworm Jim - 1000 words on a video game and cartoon character of minor importance from the mid 90's.

So what do we have? Out of the five random articles I got one comic book supervillan, one "covenant" from a vampire role playing game, and one video game character. Not exactly the hard hitting historical figures in most reference books. What does this tell us of the folks who enter information in Wikipedia? Exactly, they're geeks. Not that there's anything wrong with that, without geeks we wouldn't have the internet, it's just an observation.