Just for fun, I took a look at how many Google hits there are for the phrase “I love Wikipedia” (54,000) versus those for “I hate Wikipedia” (542). Are you serious? At first glance, this might suggest there are perhaps 1,000 Wikipedia lovers for every hater! That’s disturbing.

But, fear not. As we look at the Top 10 sites that Google returns for “I love Wikipedia”, we see the following:

1. A mis-ranked page from Wikipedia about the country music album, “Everything I Love”, which has nothing to do with loving Wikipedia.


A future Wikipediot, incubation stage

2. A Flickr page depicting a clearly deranged cultist breeding another likely Wikipedian.
3. A “Bestuff.com” voting page, which includes a Google-friendly quote from 2 years ago, by someone named Adrian who said (incoherently), “I love Wikipedia, funnily i’m using these days for also tech specs on standards. It’s just sooo good.”
4. Next is a blog, “Journeys of Jack Tripper” who only loves Wikipedia because there was at one time an article about a EuroLeague basketball player which stated, “He was the 6th pick in the 2008 NBA draft by the New York Knicks. He was promptly traded for 4 pounds of fresh mozzarella cheese.” Yeah, we love Wikipedia in that way, too.
5. Another weblog, this one loving Wikipedia for its article entry for buttock cleavage; also called the “coin slot”, “builder’s bum”, “plumber’s butt”, or “Dagenham smile”.
6. Yet another blog, but this time, the guy is truly in love with Wikipedia for what it is supposed to be. But John seems to need just a couple of his screws tightened. He spells the word “article” as artile. And he metaphorically opines about Wikipedia as, “it’s ground zero for human beings to learn again how to really read”. Yeah, I’d pretty much agree with that, it’s the point of the most severe damage or destruction, as with a nuclear explosion, an earthquake, or an epidemic.
7. Another blog that uses the phrase “I love Wikipedia” only to mock the encyclopedic cesspit. He seemed to like this passage about Skeletor: Although Skeletor can clearly hear, he has (virtually) never been depicted as having ears. He does seem to have a sense of smell though, as he is shown in the 2002 MYP series attempting to block his nose when Stinkor appears before him to beg a boon, which has some logic as his skull would still have nasal passages permitting him to breathe, if he in fact still needs to. Ironically, when shown as Keldor in flashbacks from the 2002 cartoon, the character’s distinctive nasal voice (a sound-alike of Alan Oppenheimer’s original portrayal) is markedly less nasal than as Skeletor, despite actually having a nose. US Olympic swim champion Michael Phelps has stated his plans to be a full-time skeletor in his post-olympic career.
8. A blogger who loves Wikipedia for its details on the North American Numbering Plan for ten-digit telephone numbers. Yay.
9. A Wikimedia Commons photograph of the same pregnant cultist found in Result #2.
10. And rounding out the Top 10 Google hits for “I love Wikipedia” is a mailing list post that points to an article in The Onion that, again, mocks Wikipedia with the headline: “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence: Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored“.

Fear not, those who criticize Wikipedia for all its faults and problems and laughable self-importance about the silliest of subjects… Even among those who “love Wikipedia”, apparently the good majority are saying it in jest or with unsound mind.

Whew.