Pretty Important guest post
By: Joe Larkin
I’m sure a title like that has many of you scoffing. “That fool!” you think, “ignoring one of the most versatile user-created sites on the ‘net! Why, the only people too good to use Wikipedia are pseudo-intellectual, self-important hipsters and my English 110 professor!” I swear though, it isn’t what you think..
There was a time, not long ago, when I loved Wikipedia. A couple of times I literally spent hours following links, reading pages and pages of random information and occasionally correcting a typo. If someone had a question, about pretty much anything, I’d be the first to champion Wikipedia as a go-to source for information. The times they are a-changin’, however, and not only do I avoid using Wikipedia, I urge you to do the same. The direct catalyst for my change of heart? An Internet viral sensation known as Tourette’s Guy.
For those of you not familiar with the meme, Tourette’s Guy is a series of short videos, shot in a reality- or documentary-like style, featuring the foulmouthed Danny in his everyday life. Danny, a Tourette’s sufferer, is prone to ridiculous bouts of cursing and other outrageousness, such his ever-present Tony the Tiger shirt and seemingly pointless neckbrace. Go watch it; it’s funny. Then go check the Tourette’s Guy Wikipedia page.
I guess I should have said, “Go TRY to check the Tourette’s Guy Wikipedia page”, because there isn’t one. The page was deleted some time ago and repeatedly denied recreation by the Wiki-Powers-That-Be. Why, you ask? The relevant discussion page at the time seemed to indicate two reasons: that Tourette’s Guy was offensive and did not meet notability guidelines. And on this, my friends, I cry complete and total shenanigans.
Notability guidelines? Tourette’s Guy at one point had its own web domain, a message board, and merchandise. Search YouTube and you’ll find heaps of “best of” videos, compilations, and full episodes. A couple of pro-Danny friends of mine in their mid-twenties work and go to school with kids just out of high school; this younger crowd is generally acquainted with the meme. People are certainly aware of it. Besides, about the only thing not notable enough for Wikipedia are ordinary people. Tons of internet viral videos have Wikipedia pages. Tiny towns that nobody has heard of have Wikipedia pages. Every imaginable (and imagined) sub-genre of music has a Wikipedia page. Frankly, to say Tourette’s Guy is not notable enough for the site is absurd.
Declaring Tourette’s Guy non-Wiki material because it is offensive is also absurd. This is a website that not only has an entry on the sexual practice of fisting, but a picture on said page depicting the “silent duck” hand position. There are pages for the Internet memes Mr. Hands and goatse; for anyone who doesn’t know what those are, the former is a video clip of a man being sodomized by a horse (when it first appeared, it was widely believed that description should read “being sodomized—to death—by a horse”) and the latter is a photo of a man using both hands to display the impressive diameter to which the human anus can be stretched. There are pages for Nazis, serial killers and rapists. Pages for hate groups and “deviant” sexual behaviors. Pages upon pages exist for pornography and the porn industry, including a bio page for director Max Hardcore (currently imprisoned on obscenity charges, which is another rant altogether). Pages on South Park, the movie Kids and books that were burned a century ago. Tourette’s Guy contains foul language, and it admittedly does intentionally and insensitively misrepresent the symptoms of a legitimate mental disorder, but just because some people might find it offensive (a completely subjective concept to begin with) does not mean it is not worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedic website. Especially if it’s one that contains a picture of how you should position your hand for full insertion into your sexual partner. If you’re offended by it, you don’t have to look at it. Or, in this case, look at an encyclopedic entry about it.
And, ultimately, this is the problem. Wikipedia bills itself as “The Free Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit”, but is fast becoming “The Free Encyclopedia That Only Certain People Are Allowed to Edit”. The promise, and key innovation, of Wikipedia was that anyone and everyone could contribute. This wasn’t an encyclopedia written by hooded figures in a solemn monastery, or by pompous, tweed-jacketed intellectuals. Wikipedia was different; a dynamic, proletariat experiment that allowed the wealth of the masses to be collected, shared and improved upon. The so-called “Web 2.0” revolution was that MySpace (and more importantly, Facebook) let us all have a website, YouTube let us all be television stars, and Wikipedia let us all be intellectuals. No longer were such things the domain of the rich, powerful, talented or lucky. Media—and by extension, information—was in a way never before the realm of the public at large.
Wikipedia, however, has abandoned its roots and stated purpose in favor of approval from the very system it once undermined. In hopes of credibility in the eyes of high school teachers and liberal arts professors, in an attempt to replace World Book or Encarta as the go-to source for information in the Information Age, Wikipedia has begun a crackdown on who can edit its pages and what those edits can contain; a shift of which the deletion of the Tourette’s Guy page is only a part. Will this effort to be more accurate and scholarly to eliminate citation-less factual errors and late night “u r gey” vandalism? Of course it will. But it will also eliminate the hilarity of checking Sam Jackson’s biography and discovering how, by the age of 10, he was the most hard-assed dude on the block. It will cause pages on underground or subculture-based phenomenon to be limited to information that can be cited from outside sources (causing those pages to lack accuracy and credibility, much like an MTV report about punk rock). It will, and has, brought the deletion and omission of cultural information that The Wikipedia Elite doesn’t approve of. Wikipedia will turn from a noble experiment in shared information to just another canonical, cookie-cutter encyclopedia. In short, this is pure and simple censorship.
And that is why I boycott Wikipedia. Information should always—ALWAYS—be free and available to anyone willing to look for it. It doesn’t matter if the flow is obstructed by the government, by the church, by burning books or editing Wikipedia—omitting data from a cache of information is an embodiment of social control, and the antithesis of freedom. This might seem like a trivial instance, and maybe it is, but to me it is a matter of principle. Don’t tell me “anyone can edit it!” if that just ain’t true. To paraphrase Danny, “I used your encyclopedia. The one supposedly anyone can edit. And it made me feel like a PIECE OF—”
I think the heyday of Wikipedia is over. In 2006, only 1-2% of visitors to the site actually contributed content. Now, as the struggle between those who want to include anything and everything and the elitist editors plays out, more and more of the site’s active contributors are leaving. It’s getting harder and harder to make changes to content as an “average contributor” without having the top editors revert the content to its previous form.
I’m not sure how I feel about trusting information from so-called experts that have nothing better to do with their time than put the most minute changes under the magnifying glass.
At least we know urbandictionary.com won’t be headed for the same fate anytime soon.
I guess you have standards that Wiki does not. Isn’t your view a bit purist that Wiki is not as offensive as you would like it to be?
There is clearly not a standard of decency to be “fit” for Wikipedia. Several examples of far more offensive topics were given. I’ll let Joe respond, it’s his article and I’m not going to speak for him. My own thoughts are that I feel like Wikipedia has become a club where only the cool kids are allowed to participate. By cool kids I mean ultra-nerds. If this argument has anything to do with purity, it is a lack of purity that is the problem. “Pure” Wikipedia would allow anyone to edit it, like the site claims. Cleaning up vandalism is one thing, but in a strive for the accuracy/legitimacy as a source it will NEVER achieve, it is losing everything that once made it great.
Ok, first of all, I’m sorry if you believe that Tourettes guy is real. If you think that this is what Tourettes Syndrome is, than your terribly wrong. First of all, i know what I’m talking about, because i have Tourettes. Now, if I assume correctly, you might be thinking “what poor soul, he has to be mean to everybody and curse all the time”. Well, if you think this, than you are terribly wrong. I have motor and vocal Tourettes. only 10% of people with Tourettes have the closest thing to what is being described in the video, which is coprilailia (is that how you spell it?), and thats still not close to what the video is. Now, before I say that the ‘Tourettes Guy’ doesn’t have Tic’s, i will agree that the topic is debatable. But still. What kind of person with a mental disability would make a youtube comedy, make-fun-of series about it. i Know if he had Tic’s, and i was him, than i would stop making videos and delete all of the Tourettes guy videoes i had. These kind’s of videos are whats causing ignorance and false statements. In this case its that that is what Tourettes is. I think speak on behalf of the people that HAVE Tourretes when i say, no wonder wikipedia put it on inappropriate, it’s horrible. If you want to find out what Touretts is REALLY like than visit http://www.tsa-usa.org/. Who knows, maybe he does have Tourettes, but still….
Wikipedia could really help to clarify things about the Tourette’s guy. I, for example, after viewing his videos immediately tried to find a Wikipedia article about him. The videos left me wondering a lot of things, like: Is he an alcoholic? Are the videos being taken with his consent? Or the most important, does he really have TS? Wikipedians could easily gather this information from credible sources and compile it in a nice and informative article. I really don’t see any reason why such an article shouldn’t exist.
Did you do a google search for tourettes guy just so you could find someone to attack for watching it?
Of course tourettes guy isn’t real, the videos feature terrible acting. Also, the original website said that he had died, and now he’s apparently come back to life.
Just because people find tourettes guy amusing doesn’t mean that they think it is an accurate depiction of the disorder.
Maybe some people do, but in this article he pointed out that tourettes guy misrepresents the disorder, so I don’t see any reason for you to attack him.
Yes, it’s good to get the accurate info out there about any mental disorder, since they are all very misunderstood, but you don’t have to be so antagonistic.
I just want to say that I to have Tourettes, mostly motor but some vocal, and I think Tourettes guy is hilarious. I believe anything is open for comedy. What kind of pity-mongering, self-centered person would be so outraged just because someone is making comedic fiction about “their” disease. Get over yourself.
I’d like to start out by saying I also suffer from tourette’s syndrome (because apparently opinions of those who suffer from it are more valid than those that don’t have it, like when a religious studies major with a concentration in Islam doesn’t have as legitimate of an opinion as one who actually practices the faith) (That was sarcasm, by the way). Wikipedia does strive to produce FACT. It is a FACT
I’d like to start out by saying I also suffer from tourette’s syndrome (because apparently opinions of those who suffer from it are more valid than those that don’t have it, like when a religious studies major with a concentration in Islam doesn’t have as legitimate of an opinion as one who actually practices the faith) (That was sarcasm, by the way). Wikipedia does strive to produce FACT. It is a FACT that Danny existed, had tourettes and his videos exist. It is almost like denying he existed by disallowing a page of his to be on a website that claims to list everything that is fact. Most people literally think the name of the Wiki page will be “Tourette’s Guy” or something, when in reality it could (and should) be named with his full name and THEN his notoriety as an internet viral sensation. His videos aren’t quite as insulting, in fact I find that it brings people to be more aware of the disease (I would know I suffer from the same case of Tourette’s as you do). It only *really* takes offense when you do, which isn’t the most reasonable thing to do as it makes it look like you’re insecure about it and treat it as something you wish you never had and such and such, where it should be treated as an objective fact and nothing more.
I still think Wikipedia is a good place to start. It can provide good references. How “accurate” are western history books? How “true” is a white man’s version of what happened to the American Indians?
Tourettes is like dyslexia; neither of them exist as anything other than something to console kids that something isn’t their fault, example:
Mum: It’s OK Johnny, you’re not thick because you can’t do the work and others can, you’re, erm, you’re….dyslexic, it’s a life threatening condition that only seems to affect stupid people.
You know, there are worse things than dyslexia or Tourette’s. Like being completely insensitive and idiotic. We sometimes refer to that as AHS.
Alien Hand Syndrome? (It’s in Wikipedia.)
If you are offended by Tourettes guy or not.. the fact remains that the videos exist on Youtube and the internet. I think Wikipedia should have a factual article about it. I think the videos are funny. If he really doesn’t have tourettes, it’s probably not so acceptable to those that have tourettes or are offended by anybody making light of it but that doesn’t mean Wiki can’t tell people the truth about this man. You can tell some of it is staged but still he says some pretty funny stuff. It’s funnu how Wkileaks can release senstitive classified information that can strain world peace but wikipedia can’t have an article able some crazy guy on Youtube???
i killed him
I have mild Tourette’s and I love “Tourette’s Guy”. I think the actor who played Danny either has Tourette’s or he knew someone who did because of the absurd things he says. There’s nothing offensive about a comedic portrayal of a disorder – should Wikipedia delete “Family Guy” because Peter Griffin’s paraplegic neighbor they always make fun of? I’m dead serious when I say that I’d rather watch Tourette’s Guy than 99% of the crap Hollywood puts out. Before I stumbled across this blog, I was blissfully reminiscing the true greatness of Tourette’s Guy – comedy doesn’t get better than that – Wikipedia must be against comedy. I’m making Tony the Tiger shirts on UberPrints.com that say “BOB SAGET!” and “DON’T TALK SHIT ABOUT TOTAL!” instead of “THEY’RE G-R-R-REAT!” – make your own! The font to use is: “Toonish” (and it’s free). In the immortal words of Danny, I say to Wikipedia: “WHAT THE FUCK?!”