Although I still don’t believe that there’s any conceivable reason why the entirety of Wikipedia would need to be printed out and bound into a thousand physical volumes, I do enjoy reading up on all sorts of random topics on it; even if the facts are sometimes inaccurate, the sheer volume of knowledge it holds is enough to make any trivia buff salivate. But say you want to develop a method for reading through the entirety of Wikipedia in the most efficient way possible: What then? Don’t bother with Wikipedia itself — head straight to the TL;DR Wikipedia Tumblr instead.
Frequent Redditors will be more than familiar with the term; for those of you who don’t waste large portions of their existence on a site known equally for crowd-sourcing sex advice and for the lack of sociability of its community (and yes, I am one of them), “TL;DR” stands for “too long, didn’t read.” It’s tagged at the end of posts containing blocks of texts, enabling anyone who can’t be bothered to read the whole thing to get the gist of it in a sentence or two. At their worst, TL;DRs contain too few details to be interesting; at their best, they’re comedic gems worthy of the late, great George Carlin. Apply that theory to lengthy and boring Wikipedia entries, and, well… you get where this is heading.
Don’t have the time to read the entire history of the cello? TL;DR:
Curious about why sweatpants exist? TL;DR:
Couldn’t quite make it through The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged? TL;DR:
Wondering what the deal with Ringo Starr is? TL;DR:
Awww. Poor Ringo.
But seriously, you guys. This might just be the best thing ever to happen to Wikipedia since the Tumblr [citation needed] — which, by the way, you should also check if, like me, you are mildly obsessed with bad writing appearing in public places.
TL;DR Wikipedia has been around for roughly a month, and as the Daily Dot notes, they’re unlikely to run out of fodder anytime soon; they’re also now accepting user submissions, so if you’ve got a bone to pick with vacuum cleaners or Jackson Pollock or what have you, congrats — you’ve now got just the venue for your ire. Nothing is out of bounds, so knock yourself out.
Images: TL;DR Wikipedia/Tumblr
