Do you need help telling the difference between a Renaissance Pope and an oracular octopus? Do you need details on what inappropriate body parts the attendees at Wing Bowl expose to one another? Do you need an accounting of which movies in the Air Bud series contain the fewest fart jokes? Fortunately, all these facts are lovingly recorded on Wikipedia, thus fulfilling the dreams of generations of scholars who worked towards a compendium of the world's most vital information.
But how can you find these details, hidden as they are among boring facts about science and history and stuff? Fear not: For nearly two years, the blog [Citation Needed] has sifted through The Best of Wikipedia's Worst Writing. A thousand entries later, Conor Lastowka and Josh Fruhlinger have handpicked over 200 of their favorite examples of putrid prose and collected them here. Each entry features hilarious commentary from the authors, but they're confident you'll already be laughing by the time you get to it.
Praise for [Citation Needed]
"Wikipedia has long been my favored source of dubious scholarship, unverified assertions, press-release hagiography, and confusing recaps of comic books in long run-on sentences. It is not merely that this material is USEFUL to a writer of fake trivia. There is also a strange pleasure that comes in witnessing very bad writing and wondering at the human mind that conceives it, and why that mind is so preoccupied with the drama behind the scenes of House Party 4. I am just glad that I now have the best of the worst, all hilariously annotated by Fruhlinger and Lastowka, and all bound in one non-internet volume such that I can enjoy these bits of grim, awkward human poetry without feeling tempted to get into a huge online fight over the weight of Mr. Belvedere." -John Hodgman
"You will not be surprised to discover many of Wikipedia's worst writing comes from entries with nerdy subjects, include Care Bears (and their suspect genders), Adult Diaper fetishes, bizarre assumptions about He-Man characters, and more. I'm convinced Topless Robot readers will love the hell out of it...Frulinger and Lastowka are not nearly as mean-spirited as I am and about five million times funnier. The book is available here at Amazon for $11. If you have a Kindle, the ebook is only $1, which is the most absurd entertainment value I've seen in quite some time." -Rob Bricken, ToplessRobot.com
About the Author:
Josh Fruhlinger is the creator of the Comics Curmudgeon, a surprisingly successful blog that makes fun of Mary Worth and Apartment 3-G and proves that pretty much anyone can become mildly famous on the Internet for any reason whatsoever, as long as they update every day. He's also written for the satirical political blog Wonkette, recorded a RiffTrax, and finished in third place on his only Jeopardy! appearance (the correct answer was "Golda Meir"). He lives in Baltimore with his wife Amber and his cat Hoagie.
Conor Lastowka has written for RiffTrax.com for the majority of its existence. He founded the fake holiday National High Five Day, plays bass in his fake band Re-Ree and hosts the all too real [Citation Needed] Podcast. He lives in San Diego with his wife Lauren and his cat Slidell.
