Die Wikipedia, Die!

Much as I’d love to say that the internet is a warm and glowing place full of really helpful information (and by so doing somehow confirm my older brother’s belief that it is in fact the great leveling of the intellectual playing field that finally gives the proletariat masses the voice they so desperately yearn for and so rightfully deserve), I can’t go there. It is a gigantic stewing mess of garbage and chaff. And porn. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Nowhere is the howling whoosh of bullshit heard with such crystalline turbine ferocity as it is in Wikipedia. That shiteating fake encyclopedia came and tied my shoelaces together while I slept last year, when I made the horrible mistake of accepting something written there as fact (this is before I found out that it is entirely written by half-informed douchebags just like you and me) while researching a story. It was the eleventh hour, I was desperate, my legitimate sources weren’t calling back, so Wikipedia to the rescue.

And whaddya know, it was wrong!

Go figure.

So now, check out what this fine gem of a resource has to say about yours truly:

Mike Ferrentino is a mountain bike journalist. He is known for his first-person, you-are-there style of documenting the sport, as well as his avowed love for writers like Hunter Thompson and Ken Kesey. He was born in California but raised in New Zealand.

Ferrentino came to the attention of most mountain bikers when he began writing a column in 1994 for a new glossy mountain bike magazine that the publishers of Surfer Magazine were putting together called BIKE. This column was called The Grimy Handshake, a reference to the column's bike-mechanic point of view. Ferrentino was the bike shop everyman, representing the oft-maligned, but equally oft-worshipped bike mechanics. While others came and went during the period between then and now, Ferrentino - BIKE's "random juggernaut" as he was called - stuck with the magazine. In 2005, with the departure of editor Ron Ige, Mike Ferrentino became the Editor in Chief of BIKE magazine. He also was guest editor for an issue of the well-regarded UK MTB magazine Singletrack in this year.

Mike is known for being a champion of "old school" mountain biking. This means many things to many people, but in Ferrentino's case it can be taken to mean a love of light, relatively fragile, cross-country mountain bikes, made with steel- the original, repairable, and resilient MTB frame material, and it means that a person should put in the effort to climb hills before enjoying the reward of riding back down. This is as opposed to the increasingly popular practice of riding a ski lift to the top of the mountain along with a bike too heavy to be ridden to the top, then quickly enjoying the downhill before being effortlessly whisked to the top once again.

Sweet Corn Of Christ, who wrote that shit? “The bike shop everyman?” Dear God, what tripe. A “champion of ‘old school’ mountain biking...a love of light, relatively fragile...blahblahblah...”

Really, who wrote that? I have my suspicions. An Englishman wrote it. And judging from the history of the article viewed in “The Free Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit,” I’m going to assume that another Englishman had a whack at editing it. Two Englishmen, who if I’m correct, really ought to have more productive things to do with their time, have just electronically immortalized me as some sort of knee-sock wearing luddite. At least I can say with some degree of certainty that I’ve actually met the two Englishmen in question. That said, I have no idea what, aside from maybe a gigantic dose of web-hubris, would compel anyone to even bother writing up this kind of pap.

Although, I can’t say it’s entirely inaccurate. Well, I DON’T wear knee-socks. But that isn’t the point here. The point is twofold. One, who the fuck cares enough to even bother entering me in some fucking encyclopedia? It isn’t like I discovered penicillin. Shouldn’t encyclopedias be reserved for Facts That Matter? And two, if the damn thing can be edited by anyone, how can there ever be any actual accountability, fact checking, veracity, or system of checks and balances? I mean, if I want to go on there, edit it, and state that I am, to coin an old Monty Python line, “fond of golf, strangling animals and masturbation,” then who’s to say that won’t be taken as fact by some poor schlub down the line?

Which would suck. Because I’m not into golf at all. Here’s three dots...