With the right state of mind, enough time on your hands, and a can-do attitude/darkened worldview, your casual Wikipedia browsing can quickly devolve into hours spent amongst the site's weird, bizarre, and morbidly fascinating black holes. Making it virtually impossible to uncover all of the site's many dark and dusty corners—but damned if we didn't try.
We'll probably never be able to find them all, but we can at least compile the strangest of the strange. Here are some of the weirdest, most bizarre Wikipedia entries we've ever laid eyes on. Think you've got a better one to share? Don't hold back, friend. We're here to learn.
10 of the Weirdest Wikipedia Pages We've Ever Seen
List of unusual deaths
A bit gloomy start for the list (first of all I do not want to show any disrespect), but there is something incredibly exciting in reading the list of unusual deaths. My favorite item - Robert Williams, who died in 1979. This is the first man, who was killed by a robot, and I think that when the war with the robots happens, we will remember him.
List of animals with fraudulent diplomas
Believe it or not, there are such animals in the world that have academic degrees and documents, confirming that they have graduated from university. Cat named George became a member of the British Council in neuro-linguistic programming.
Banana equivalent dose
Banana equivalent is a unit of measurement of radioactive source activity, corresponding to about 32 becquerels. Eating one banana, a person gets about 1% of the dose of radiation per day (i.e. 100 bananas a day) – that is why it is so easy to measure consumer radiation.
Phantom time hypothesis
Unusual conspiracy theory was proposed by the German historian Herbert Illig. He stated that the period of the world history, which is called the Middle Ages, was either incorrectly dated or had never existed at all.
52-hertz whale
Fifty two hertz whale is the whale of unknown species, which is regularly found in the oceans, even since 1980s. He sings in the unusual highs of 52 hertz (it is much lower than in all known species of whales). Probably, it cannot be heard by other whales, so it is called the loneliest whale in the world.
Emu War
I mentioned in my blog about this article, but I call on you again to read it. This event is from the Australian history when the Australian military entered a battle with emus - and lost. This battle is also known as The Great War with Emu.
List of lists of lists
Everything is simple: the meta article in “Wikipedia”.
William McGonagall
William McGonagall is the worst poet in history; anyway, this is the way they see it in England and Scotland. It is thought that he understood nothing in rhymes and rhythm, in metaphor, in poetry as a whole. On McGonagall performances angry crowd threw vegetables at him, while he was reading poetry.
South-up map orientation
Inverted geographical map is a map of the world in which the south is shown at the top and the north at the bottom. Thus, Australia and New Zealand are at the top of the map. These maps are used to teach critical thinking.
Wikipedia:Unusual articles
Finally, the article showing that “Wikipedia” creators and editors are also aware that it has a lot of unusual things - a list of unusual articles from “Wikipedia”. There are a lot of them here, so you can easily spend few days for reading these articles.