Oldman farts out Somersault rings...
SUPERSWEET have been working undercover with LIARS to probe into the encyclopedial orifice of Wikipedia. Wanting to kick some corrupt cyber butt, we hunted down misleading information and hoax pages to oust the jokers, lazy administrators, liars and faceless editors that govern this lexicon of our free culture movement. Never mind the Queen, does Gary Oldman really spend his days squatting in a dungeon, free-mason style, carving cryptic images into blocks of stone? According to Wikipedia, the truth isn’t out there…
MISSION ONE: LIARS
First up, SUPERSWEET created our own Wiki account. Dressed in HTML plain-clothing, we snuck in through the back door to access LIARS article and edit that annoying bit of false garb claiming Angus Andrew to be Australian born, correcting it to Filipino instead. Angus, we hope we’ve done the right thing, because as you can see below… it actually stands corrected! No bastard administrator has tried to change it back. Yet. If we should have put ‘Philippine-born’ instead, can you let us know? Otherwise we look a bit stupid.
MISSION TWO: GARY OLDMAN
Satisfied with completing Mission One, SUPERSWEET went one step further. In October 2009, inspired by I Got You on Tape’s 'Somersault' song and video, we researched the notorious Somersault Syndrome, a mental affectation that makes people scribble endless somersault rings onto paper or carve them into blocks of stone with just their finger nails. Wikipedia threw up the following article:
We were almost fooled. While the syndrome does affect some people, the crux of this article was a hoax. It claimed Somersault rings were discovered as mysterious emblems in cave paintings and as Egyptian hieroglyphs some centuries before. Any photographic evidence it provided had been seriously doctored – thanks to the transparency of the net, the photos in their original form were easily sourced and hey presto, without the somersaults grafted onto them. The article even claimed actor Gary Oldman suffered from Somersault Syndrome, to the extent that he obsessively carved the rings into blocks of stone in his dungeon-like burial chamber. Clicking on the citation links only took us to Gary’s biography, with nothing to back up these claims. SUPERSWEET rolled up our sleeves again and went in to clean up the bullshit. See Figure 3 below:
MISSION THREE: BRING BACK SUPERSWEET
One week later, we were surprised to see that someone at Wiki had actually taken us seriously and removed the hoax article all together. You see? Do something about it and get results. We can’t find any trace of the article and those administrators at Wiki must be kicking themselves by now, “how could we have been so stupid?” they mumble. “I thought Gary Oldman was cool but now he’s just another boring actor”. In response, SUPERSWEET has written the following thank you letter to Wikipedia for taking us seriously.
As you can see, what we still want to know is, how come our SUPERSWEET biography was deleted from Wikipedia when crap hoaxes remain? Was it because MTV’s Sweet Sixteen were greedy for global media coverage? For almost two years, SUPERSWEET had our own profile page with links, testimonials and citations until MTV came along. So we’ve written another letter to Jimmy Wales, asking him to fix this terrible mistake for us. Jim’ll fix it, right?
WE'LL LET YOU KNOW HOW WE GOT ON.
Words: Tiffany Tondut
Illustration: Federica Ubaldo