My new favourite pages on Wikipedia

By Charles Sutton on February 9, 2013

I have several new favourite pages on Wikipedia:

  • A list of films that most frequently use the word “fuck”. Apparently there are people who count these things. Unsurprisingly, the winner is a documentary about the use of the word “fuck”.
  • List of lists of lists. There many pages on Wikipedia that are lists of lists, e.g., every country has a list of lakes in that country. So there is a page that lists all of the “Lists of lakes in Country X”. But this page is only one of the many lists of lists on Wikipedia. This list of all such pages is the Lists of Lists of Lists. [h/t: Daniel Renshaw]

Previously, my favourite page on Wikipedia hd been a description of the seven different forms of lightsaber combat. (Apparently, Samuel L Jackson’s character had developed a form to himself. That’s how he was able to beat the Emperor.) Sadly this page has since been deleted from Wikipedia, and it is impossible to retrieve deleted pages. There is a page on this topic on Wookiepedia, but it contains a scary level of detail that in my opinion renders it much less readable than the old Wikipedia page.

Related to the “fuck” list, I also like the study Delete Expletives?, which is a British study of people’s attitudes towards obscenity, particularly on television. One of the excellent features of this study is a ranked list of swear words in British English, based on a survey of over 1000 respondents.

Tags: silly