'Pedia Studies

I imagine most regular Web users are well familiar with Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia run along anarchist lines, with full editing privileges granted to all. If not, The Guardian ran a worthwhile article on the concept a while ago. It's a truly vast and comprehensive resource, and usually a good 90% reliable -- although in the nature of things, at any given time any given article may be utter drivel. It draws on the specialist expertise of a vast population of users -- all of whom know a great deal about something, even if it's only how to type so that nobody knows what the hell you're on about.

Anyway. I've been using Wikipedia for a while -- not least for reference links from this blog -- but I hadn't come across its inventory of "Unusual Articles" until it was brought to my attention by Hatmandu. Since then I've been obsessively livening the drudgery of work by going through the list.

I already knew about a number of the entities referred to -- the Reptilians, for instance, vagina dentata and the recently-discovered Mexican Perforation. Somehow, however, the entire existence of the Voynich Manuscript has previously managed to pass me by. And I was delighted to discover the existence of Mr Optimus Prime, of Exploding Head Syndrome and of the Wilhelm Scream.

The Timeline of Unfulfilled Christian Prophecy is well worth a look, too. But my favourite discovery has to be Heribert Illig, the German historian whose "phantom time hypothesis" insists that most of the Dark Ages were just made up, with 300 spurious years having been inserted into history shortly before the Medieval period.

According to Herr Illig (who believes that this was done at the insistence of one of the Holy Roman Emperors so that he could pretend he was reigning at the turn of the Millennium), the current year should rightfully be 1707. It's one of those fantastically barking-mad ideas which becomes more and more entertaining the more you think about it.

Like Wikipedia itself, it's a splendid example of "thinking outside the box". Admittedly, though, I wouldn't expect it ever to catch on in quite such a big way.