It was the spring of 2004, and a friend of mine had introduced me to Wikipedia for the very first time. Like all unscrupulous brats, the first thing we always simply must do when we discover something new and wonderful is to spend all of our mental and physical resources attempting to vandalize it. We started with the obvious, e.g. changing dates, inserting the odd expletive, creating pages for ourselves with grossly over-adulatory biographies. These edits were always caught with terrifying rapidity, and as we had not yet tired of the project, and like all young men wanted to make a lasting impact on the world, we were forced to adapt our tactics and we began exploring subtlety. We tried keeping the basic facts of an article correct while altering grammar and style to create a variety of bizarre effects - a specialty of mine was a very disorienting juxtaposition of amateurish vocabulary with a sort of erudite, Victorian sentence structure. We would compete, seated side by side in the university library, to see who's edit would last the longest before being caught and reverted. A huge advantage of this arrangement was that we could easily move to another terminal every time our IP address was banned.
When we had tired of this paradigm (after a few weeks I dare say), our youthful audacity once again broke forth and goaded us on to better, more ambitious designs. "After all," we said, "if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well" - this had always been our mantra, which we always applied with ironic impropriety. Our hope was that a bold enough move, if done with sufficient confidence, might just be crazy enough to fool everyone and stick. With particular pride, and to give just one example, I recall inventing a new language, which I continued to work on for several days before all of my efforts were cruelly wiped clean. "Its not fair," I remember thinking, "I speak this language. They have languages on here that no one speaks anymore! Its all so arbitrary!"
Now the really funny business is this. One of my edits really did stick; it was one of the subtle sort, when we were searching out the most obscure corners of human knowledge and attempting to make the most inconsequential additions and subtractions. Every now and then, I check to see if it is still there. It always is. This falsehood began its life on a new page that I created for it. The page was a stub, with only one, very false, very trivial sentence. When he was created, he was one of several in his litter - all pertaining to the same subject (and accordingly referenced on that subject's main page), and all totally false.
This little falsehood has survived a great deal; when he was merged with another page, he managed to keep his head above the raging waters; when this page was split, he managed to avoid the rocks and keep his toes pointed downstream; when his grammar was edited, he kept a straight face. Tragically, all of his brother falsehoods were lost at one point or another, and I still have tremendous admiration for his resilience. I probably needn't say that he had also won my dearest affection, truly a special place in my heart.
Recently I told the story of my little falsehood to a friend of mine, and she promptly Googled him. I realize now how strange it was that it had never occurred to me to do this. I guess I just thought my little falsehood would never grow-up. But what a joy when first I learned that now he had a family of his own! I was so proud. The Google search reported not just the Wikipedia article in which he resided, but also three hundred and fifty six little baby falsehoods! (Let me assure you that my son has a very unique name). But the joy soon faded as I inspected my many grandchildren. In hindsight it is of course obvious, but at the time I was slow in drawing the inference - my falsehood had reproduced asexually. All of his offspring were identical copies - but really, I mean identical. A bit eerie, that. Staring at the rows and rows of these little demons gave me the willies, and it started to change the way I felt about my once dear little, very own, pride-and-joy falsehood. Every time I look at him now a chill runs up my spine and I cannot get the image of all those blankly staring beastly robotic repetitions out of my head. I try to justify it. "How could I have known," I often wail, "that people would blindly trust Wikipedia without checking facts?" Perhaps I made him too good, too resilient, too much of a survivor. Can I destroy him now? Or will that be interpreted as vandalism? And even if I did succeed, how can I possibly defeat all of his spawn - and all of their spawn?
