PickiPedia:Satire

Is everything on PickiPedia true?

Yes, every word and symbol is accurate within a precision of 99.9999%, and we know this because site administrator Bill Monroe personally verifies all edits, with the exception of Jimmy Martin's Theory of Bluegrass Pythagoras, which is administered by Carton Haney.

Yeah, fine - that's funny. But listen, some of this is satire, right?

No. 100% serious.

OK, but like, you can't keep saying that forever. People aren't gonna be cool putting genuine content here if they can't figure out whether any of it is meant to be taken seriously.

...

...ugh, fine.

But first, one simple rule: whatever scrutiny you apply to PickiPedia by dint of it being non-trivially a shitposted farce, apply that same scrutiny to all wikis. Understand that this scrutiny is a bedrock of wiki collaboration. Wikis are not sources of truth; they are sources of sources.

Hmm. OK.

Don't get it twisted: we love WikiPedia; it's one of the most important and heartfelt ventures in the short history of the human animal. But PickiPedia:Is Not WikiPedia. A wiki can only thrive in an environment where the actual text of the page is treated as fallible consensus, not as assured (or even in some sense, asserted) truth.

All the trolling, satire, and farce you'll find on PickiPedia exists on every wiki in the world, but it's dressed up as processes and whitepapers. And instead of being patently ludicrous and hopefully a little funny, it tells of a world as seen by industries and interests that can afford not only to brigade and bot farm, but to carefully study the effects of brigades and bot farms.

So, how can I pursue the truth of a claim I read on PickiPedia?

There's a lot to say about this, and eventually we'll say some of it on PickiPedia:Sources, but we have a lot of other things to build and maintain (like, basic operational status for this website and its database, and caching, and various integrations) first.

I'm a little drunk and high and I'm thinking about writing a bunch of nonsense on PickiPedia - is that a good idea?

Uhhh, heck yeha.

But, PickiPedia isn't _all_ satire, right?

Right. You might think so at first, because most of the content that gets shared on social media is of the shitpost variety. But of the thousands of pages here, only a few dozen are satirical. Many more are structured data about artists, shows, records, etc. You are welcome to edit as you see fit - you can focus on satirical pages, or serious pages, or both.

OK, so what _are_ the rules of what satire is allowed?

Hard to say for sure, but some things that seem obvious:

• Make at least some part of it sufficiently over-the-top as to be obvious satire in the minds of a sufficiently-informed reader. This is much better than outwardly declaring it satire, which kinda defeats the purpose.

• It needs to _actually_ be funny. If it's not funny, somebody is gonna delete / revert / change it immediately.

• Jokes about banjos in general, and Cory WalkerError creating thumbnail: File missing in particular, are top priority.

• All satire has a message; a heart. Make sure it's calibrated and clean.

• Be even more careful with structured data than encyclopedic content.