Amygdala

Wikipedia, the world’s only significant source of information you can get at without doing any fucking work at all, closed for 24 hours today to protest something whose details I was going to look up on Wikipedia. Whatever it was – and there is absolutely no way of finding that out now – it was serious enough to merit the suspension of 84% of media activity in the free world, 78% of non-work-related office internet fiddling and all of my conversations about politics, sport and whether wild rice is a species of seaweed or possibly a grass that grows in brackish water.

Journalists across Europe are struggling to come to terms with the loss of what one called, “the only way I can pump out 3,000 words a day on subjects I know fuck all about.”

The financial sector has been hit hardest, with several reporters acknowledging that they “wished they’d pasted some of that basic bond stuff into a Word document” before the shutdown because they “never really bothered to figure out what the Eurozone crisis is really about.”

Told they would have to use pens and notebooks, younger hacks responded that their bosses must be complete twats as Wikipedia was down and so a notebook PC was no more use than an iPad.

“They’ve also told us to get on the phones,” said one. “Aren’t these dickheads listening - Wikipedia is down; what’s the point of trying to log on using my fucking phone – the mobile site is down as well?”

Global PR firms are in a state of panic as they realise they’ve lost control of everything. A girl who I’ve invented because Wikipedia is down and so I have no sources, took a final drag of her 30th fag of the day, downed a bottle of Chablis and BBM’d me: “All I do all day is fill my clients’ Wikipedia entries with thinly disguised advertising copy. If this goes on too long, I won’t have a job.”

Also hard hit is the army of social outcasts whose sole remaining link with reality is making sure that Wikipedia is the 100% accurate global source of all the world’s information that it is. One Wikipedian with like those amazingly thick glasses told me: “The Audit Subcommittee is in crisis. I mean how can we get on with main article re-balancing? What about our duties to the verifiable but not necessarily true?”

At this point I would likely have stopped working for a bit and gone online to see which of the colossal squid or the giant squid were the bigger and to try to learn their Latin names and the diameter of their eyes. But Wikipedia is down so I’ll just have to use Google to cut and paste a load of unverified rubbish into my article and present that as fact instead……..

Mark Zuckerberg was reportedly “smug as fuck” about the whole thing.