1 Kurilko Castle

It all began back in 2018. I was in Ukraine and wished to visit some of their less-famous-than-they-deserve-to-be castles.

But which ones? Ms Victoria Pedia is your most consummate friend when it comes to information. Enter Seven Wondrous Castles and Palaces of Ukraine:

Sidenote

Most sincere entreaties are addressed to the reading public to withhold any and every undue and improper comment as to the number of tabs opened. This is, unfortuntely, the new, sluggish Opera; the old one, running on the Presto core, could easily handle 80+ open tabs without any noticeable lag whatsoever and you were always on top of everything with nifty and neat tab stacking. Oh, the good old days… It’s been 6 years now… Where are you now, Opera, that’s what I wanna know! R.I.P.

But as Saddam H. would say, „Moving on…”

I discovered it some time in June that year. The edit had by then been ignored by another editor InternetArchiveBot… wait, that’s a… bot, right? Ha-ha, how could a bot have noticed that! Silly me…

But there’s more. Back in January, this most cute attempt at vandalism had been ignored by another user, this time a real person Wikid77. The Kurilko Castle had been there in all its glory; this deviant artist (Jhillman54) is apparently as skillful at using computers as he is at drawing. In his first edit he forgot to close the wiki table, in other words, he omitted the closing tag |} that he had inadvertently deleted when vandalizing ameliorating cutifying the page (and he obviously never used the Show preview button when submitting the changes). Happens to the best of us.

I couldn’t resist and did what 99% of sane internet users would do – googled it:

I wrote about this curiosity in an e-mail to my brother in July. I understood the risk of him diving straight in to fix it, since he is such an old bore that the greatest excitement for him is to read EULAs (End User License Agreement). Speaking of old bores and EULAs, there’s an boring old joke about it:

Arguing with a woman is like reading a EULA. It doesn’t matter what it’s about, eventually you’ll give up and in the end your answer will be: „Yes, I agree.”

However, my brother not only reads these documents, he actually follows them to a t. But luckily, being a self-titled Emperor Procrastinator I, he’s never ready for action even if it means but a quick 5-minute fix. So he apparently let it be. Most sensibly, of course, it got fed into Google Image indexing search bots:

And it shall be indexed forever after…

The wiki-entry was reverted in 2018 by some anorak from Australia… unless my brother went the extra length to mask his IP address (which proved not to be the case, since I tracked down his wiki-account).

Why didn’t I revert it? I believe it’s a unique form of artistic vandalism, much like amateur graffiti. It’s cute, it hurts no-one and if anything it only makes you smile and your day will be nicer. What more to wish for…

2 Asahel

Speaking of artistic vandalism, may I solicit a round of applause for Asahel:

Sidenote

I had requested you not to be made fun of by making wholly inappropriate remarks on the topic of open tabs. See, children, this is Opera Presto. Behaving completely normally. And yes, I am still using it, albeit occasionally (this screenshot was made some 5 years after the development had been discontinued in favor of Chromium-based core).

This vandalism seemignly must have required substantial work. On second thought, however, it merely looks more like another case of forgotten closing tag, this time after using an instance of right-to-left text (Hebrew, to be more precise), so the browser generated right-to-left alignment until the end of the paragraph, with the esteemed authorship thusly attributed to an anonymous IP address:

3 Bohemian Grove

Speaking of vandalism making it all the way to the prized repose on Google indexing servers:

So, now even Google thinks Bohemian Club is little more than a private Illuminati-based fraternity of mostly homosexual Satan worshippers. As Elisabeth Reyes the tinfoil-hat-donning army of conspiracy theorists would put it, it is only kids, the drunk, the angry, and Google search results that tell the truth.

In reality, the perpetrator who caused it (24.21.147.44) was smoked out incredibly quickly and his first couple edits (in April 2013) were reverted in a matter of hours. Later attempts (May and December that same year) were discovered – and reverted – virtually immediately, enjoying barely minutes of fame on Wikipedia. Since the screenshot is from December 18, 2013, it seems almost unbelievable that a Google crawler picked it up and indexed it to appear in search results. And the luck struck twice as I stumbled upon it by sheer chance.

Or… Could it be that Google bot indexed it only because the webpage had changed and the bot ignored the subsequent revert because Google servers had already had that version previously, thus it was considered outdated? But then wouldn’t that mean that Google indexing crawlers are prone to displaying instances of wiki vandalism by design? Hmm…

4 Emma Stone

Emma Stone, according to Google uncritically taking over content from Wikipedia, is a hot actress who happened to fall out of the sky as an angel:

5 Lunar eclipse

One more example of wikipedia vandalism getting through to Google’s own indexing search bots:

6 Sepp Bellend Blatter

Of course I cannot not mention Joseph “Sepp” Bellend Blatter – after all, it was his middle name on Wikipedia:

In a weird, twisted game of causal logic, this particular edit used circular reference to a great comedic effect in an attempt to reliably source Blatter’s unsolicited moniker to a well-respected institution (and thus pin the blame for his sordid sobriquet on the government of South Africa). Apparently the staff at the President’s office somewhat lacked in subtleties of British slang.

7 Recep Gollum Erdoğan

Speaking of old men clinging to unlimited power with corrupt middle name, I cannot not mention a certain Lord of the Rigns character:

In a farcical exchange between vandals and editors, Erdogan’s name and picture changed several times:

To corroborate that Erdoğan truly is Gollum’s doppelgänger (after all Turkey does sit on the shores of the Mediterranean), co-ordinated vandal attacks commenced on the same day (2 Dec 2015) also on Gollum’s page. It started simple enough:

The wording then grew more sophisticated:

Only to include a verifiable reference barely one edit later:

Now to crown their efforts, the vandals should have petitioned wikipedia editors for properly cited sources, as determining what vandalism is on their own apparently constitutes original research, which is, per wikipedia guidelines, strictly forbidden.

That this particular wikipedia edit holds true, this one picture confirms better than a one thousand worth of florid words:

8 Tittles

Yes, you that read right. After all, who doesn’t love titties?

For a truly artistic piece of vandalism, one should have included a picture of a pair of naked female breasts with an arrow pointing to nipples and containing enlightening commentary: “These two dots are not to be confused with tittles (superscript dots)”.