Thursday, August 03, 2006

Wacky Wikipedia Lists

Gretchen: You're weird.
Donnie: Sorry.
Gretchen: No, that was a compliment.

-- Donnie Darko (by Richard Kelly)
I love Wikipedia. I really do. One of the many great things about it is that it has all of these wonderful lists -- wacky, useful, delightful, terrifying, or all of the above -- that you probably won't find elsewhere. (Even if, in some cases, you can find them elsewhere, you won't. They're too obscure. But you might stumble across them on Wikipedia.)

Here are some lists you can find on Wikipedia. (Some of these are within another page, or are a "category" list, or whatever. They're still great.) Wikipedia has lists of...

Scientologists
Chalkboard Gags from The Simpsons (okay that one you might find elsewhere)
People Known as "The Great"
Eponymous Diseases
Films that Most Frequently Use the Word Fuck
Exclamations Used by Tintin's Captain Haddock - also in the original French
Songs Over 15 Minutes Long
Different Albums with Identical Titles (but not books, oddly...)
Candidates for the 51st State
Novels Whose Action Takes Place Within 24 Hours
Interstate Highways Sharing the Same Name
Joke Religions
Songs Parodied by Weird Al Yankovic
Lists of Cliché Lists (not a list of clichés, but a list of lists of clichés)
Unfinished Boooks
Real People Appearing in a Fictional Context
Crossovers Between People from Different Fictional Settings
Misquotations (technically on Wikiquote, not Wikipedia, but who cares?)
Symphonies Known By Name Rather Than/In Addition To By Number
Personal Names That Contain Numbers (and, more generally, Unusual Names)
Television Series that Include Time-Travel
Books At Least Partially Set in Ithaca, New York
Famous Trees
Unusual Articles on Wikipedia (a particular fun list, obviously)
Incomplete Lists on Wikipedia (huge, this is only first 200)
And, of course: Criticisms of Wikipedia

Some of my personal favorites are lists of fictional things (that link is to a list of lists of fictional things, natch.) Here are some lists of...

Fictional Apes (note this is apes only; fictional monkeys are on a separate page)
Fictional People Who Were Cremated
Fictional Books (also films and musical works)
Fictional Islands
Fictional People With One Eye
Fictional Butlers
Fictional Cities (That's A-M only; N-Z are here)
Fictional Expletives
Fictional Diseases
Fictional Artists
Fictional Games
Fictional U. S. Presidents
Fictional Languages
Fictional Clergy, including fictional Rabbis, Priests and Clergy of Fictional Religions
Fictional Fictional Characters (i.e. characters who, within the world of a fiction, are fictional)
Fictional People Known as "The Great" (a subset of the above-linked list)
Fictional Road Numbers (although not, as of now, Highways)
Fictional Rabbits (also Elephants, Ducks and Frogs -- the latter not to be confused with Frogs in Popular Culture)
Fictional Oxford Colleges (and, more generally, Fictional Schools)
Fictional Characters Predominantly Seen Wearing Sunglasses
Fictional Laws and Rules (which sadly notes that it "may never be able to satisfy certain standards for completeness")
Personifications of Death
Fictional Plants
Fictional Jews (sadly pegged for possible deletion -- vote to save it!)
Fictional Elvis Impersonators
Fictional Robots
And, finally, Fictional Universes

Sad to say, though, these sorts of pages seem to be at a high risk of extinction. Since I started bookmarking lists for a post like this (some time ago), the we've lost the following pages:

Ambiguous Three-Letter Acronyms
Musical Groups Named After References From the Simpsons
Miscellaneous Portmanteaus
Running Gags

RIP. May they return, speedily, in our days.

If any occur to you, please post additional fun Wikipedia lists in comments.

Update: a few lists added.

Update 2:
The following are all from the above-linked page of unusual Wikipedia articles. Couldn't resist adding them:

Historical Cats (as opposed to fictional cats, natch)
English Words Containing Q Not Followed by U
Nicknames Used by George W. Bush
Films that Have Been Considered the Worst Ever
Misleading Food Names
Famous Tall Women
Scandals Described as "-gate"
Strange Units of Measurement
Sexually Active Popes
Names For Characters Mentioned but not Named in the Bible
Unusual Deaths (also Premature Obituaries)
People Who Became Famous Only in Death (also through Being Terminally Ill)
Animals Displaying Homosexual Behavior
Districts of England by Percentage of Self-Proclaimed Followers of the Jedi Religion
Self-Referential Songs; also Songs Whose Titles are the Entire Lyric
Equivalents of "Oink" in Various Languages
People Widely Considered Eccentric

I'm gunning for a place on that last one.

Again, leave any favorites in comments...

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