Marshall Kirkpatrick muses in thesocialsoftware weblog that Live Journalers are bringing Wikipedia to its knees as part of a game:
Can’t help but wonder if the Wikipedia implosion was caused by the huge number of LiveJournal users who have been passing around what they call “the Wikipedia meme.” The idea is to go to Wikipedia, enter your birthdate without the year, and post 3 interesting things that happened on your birthday throughout history on your LiveJournal blog.
I’m sure there are other sites people are doing this, but if you do a Technorati search for “Wikipedia meme” you’ll see the results are almost entirely from LiveJournal sites. I went back 27 pages in the search results and wasn’t finding anything older than from 2 days ago.
Now that they (may have) broken Wikipedia, LiveJournalers have lots of funny things to say about it.
On living like a rock star…
” My day would be ten times better if I simply had a working wikipedia” -Paul J. Edwards: The Greatest Rock Star in the World
The Drama, The Passion…
“…oh my god. Wikipedia has been down for over 15 minutes. My world is shuddering to a stop.” -Her Royal Katness
“OMG! Wikipedia! Not working! *dies*” -WormmonABC
A Nerd Amongst Nerds…
“I’ve tried to look up exanimate on wikipedia, but wikipedia is down. :(” -Vert Knight
Just so you know, the word can be used as in Wikipedia and WormmonABC are both exanimate.
Comments
@ 21:42
Wikimedia might be surprised to hear that conclusion, as they reported a power supply problem as the culprit.
@ 23:58
You know, I felt funny enough about writing that post that I pretty quickly took it off the site proper - but it had already made its way through the RSS feed. I still had fun writing the post and never meant to be too conclusive. If the facts indicate otherwise then I’m glad to know it.
@ 08:25
Thank you for the correction, Dan, and comment, Marshall. It’s an interesting cultural phenomenon, even if it didn’t cause the outage problems.
@ 21:17
It’s a sweet idea. But there are only 10 million livejournals, of which most are inactive. - there are only about 250,000 posts each day. Even if *all* those posts were about the meme, it would only be a tiny blip for wikipedia, which sees some 76 million unique visitors a month. [source]
The meme has been fantastic in its own right, though: I’ve been surprised how much you learn about people from what events they consider significant.