02 May 09
A Wikipedia Theorist
If Jorge Luis Borges were alive today, he would certainly be creating hoaxes on Wikipedia. I like to imagine the pages for Pierre Menard and Tlön, Uqbar not with “Plot Summary” and “Publication History” sections, but instead with reference links to both actual and false webpages.
The Colbert Nation tripling the elephant population or revealing Warren G. Harding’s middle name (Gangsta) is all good fun, but future scholars are going to discover dusty corners of the web (even though webs don’t have corners and digital creations can’t get dusty) where someone is pursuing Borges’s ideas to their logical endpoint.
