 Wikipedia is weird. It's bonkers, really. A whole bunch of people from random backgrounds, all holding contradictory beliefs, most of whom have never even met each other, and we've been given free reign to write or delete pretty much anything we want on a website funded by the masses that even one of its co-founders hate with almost everything made on a completely volunteer basis. And yet this is what comes of it? It's completely insane. Off the rails. Incredible. Wikipedia is weird. It's weird, and yet here we are. One of the most trafficked websites in the world, used by scientists, researchers, and students of every type, and almost completely controlled by us. The mob. Okay, so Wikipedia is kind of weird. But what about weirdness on Wikipedia? For a website with such a strange and unlikely background, it can sometimes seem like our treatment of weird and humorous topics is somewhat lacking. Take, for example, the so-called Secret Cabinet of Naples. It's a famous museum containing a vast array of weird and somewhat erotic art excavated from the ruins of Pompeii, and it played a massive role in shaping our current understanding of ancient Greek conceptions of sexuality. Additionally, the museum's history of being censored by various governments, as well as secret viewings of its contents becoming a rite of passage of sorts for many Victorian men, have opened subjects of extensive coverage by historians and sociologists. We do have a solid article in sexuality in ancient Greece. The article for the Secret Cabinet is little more than a stub, and there's not a single article covering any of its contents, despite the extensive and detailed coverage by historians of many of the deeply unusual sculptures and frescoes inside. As a more recent historical example of our version towards the weird, before I added a short paragraph a few days ago, we were completely missing coverage for the phenomenon of so-called surreal means, which, thanks in part to celebrities like Elon Musk using the means to promote the subreddit, Our Wall Street Bats, precipitated what became known as a 2021 GameStop short squeeze, the effects of which are not yet completely understood, but which has certainly resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars gained at last, not to mention absolutely massive political bulk. This is a topic which requires an understanding of what many would consider the weirder parts of the internet. But despite a wealth of outside coverage, from sources ranging from anthropological journals to a full-length article from Forbes Magazine examining the history of the Stonks meme, who had somehow completely missed an absolutely essential element of this massive economic event. As far as I can tell, this was due in large part to a sense of apathy or aversion towards coverage of the weird and seemingly fringe on Wikipedia. Due to time limitations, I won't continue to give all that many more concrete examples, but if you want to see some further instances of these issues I'm discussing, I highly recommend looking through some of the roughly 20,000 articles nominated for deletion on Wikipedia that have the keywords, trivial conduct. Even controlling for the number of citations from authoritative sources, the proportion of topics, which editors deem weird, sexual, humorous, it's vastly more likely to be tagged as trivial, seemingly regardless of that topic's coverage in outside sources. So I hope I've made it clear by now that there are often obvious biases and gaps in our coverage of topics that involve the weird or the funny, which sometimes can have reverberating effects on our coverage of the deadly serious. In short, when things get weird, Wikipedia tends to look away. Why is this? Well, Wikipedia editors tend to have certain specific biases, as we're probably all aware. We're mostly composed of Western, English-speaking, Christian, or atheist white men, and the scope, coverage, and quality of articles and topics that this demographic cares about very much reflects that. Some particularly egregious biases like gender and balancing Wikipedia biographies have thankfully been receiving significant attention lately, but there are many other common biases that are both clearly evident and deeply understudied. One bearing that I'm focusing on for now is that, as mentioned before, we tend to give you topics that appear to us as weird or humorous as being less important than they actually are, leading to reduced coverage and lesser quality work on these subjects than what they actually deserve. Weirdness as a descriptor is, of course, incredibly subjective. What seems completely bizarre to one person might be accepted as totally normal by the next, but one person finds hilarious, could be interpreted completely seriously by another. This is actually emblematic of a central feature of the weird. It is the opposite of the familiar. The weird is the other. And the other, of course, can be scary or even repulsive to some. We see the sphere of the other in its most horrifying and dangerous forms when trying to fight racism, sexism, queerphobia, and other terrible forms of discrimination. But negative reactions to the other and the seemingly weird can also take more subtle, more benign, but still very harmful forms. The fact of the matter is we treat the familiar, or the normal, to different more lack standards than we treat the weird. We take humor from the unexpected. And according to at least some theorists, all humor can ultimately be viewed as subversions of the expected or the normal. As a consequence, things which appear weird or abnormal to us can sometimes also seem quite silly. And in western culture, or at least in western academia, humor is seen as being of lesser importance in history than perhaps it truly is. I personally come from an Orthodox Jewish background, which, well, I won't focus deeply on this today, does have a somewhat different view on the intersection between humor, weirdness, and culture than what most people are familiar with. To give a very brief example, Rabbi Moshe Waldoch, who's a noted historian of Jewish humor, has argued that Jewish humorists play a critical role in self-criticism within the community. As he puts it, the humorist, like the prophet, would basically take people to task for their failings. This sensibility in which humorous means, trends, and events are treated well seriously as being a vital aspect of the human condition is not often found among us Wikipedia editors. On the contrary, a sort of taboo against the weird has developed, which can lead to minimization of trash against important humor-related articles. Okay, so what can we do about this? To some degree, bias will always exist in Wikipedia. There's no such thing as a truly impartial editor, and the quest towards perfection is never ending. Of course, that doesn't mean the quest isn't worth it. We need to do our utmost to create the best encyclopedia we can, and that includes, among many other measures, taking concrete steps to be more representative of and respectful towards the unfamiliar, the humorous, and the weird. One relatively easy place to start this quest is to look for existing holes in our coverage of different topics. We tend to stick close to what we know best, but if you can use even a small percentage of your time in Wikipedia to go actively searching for the unfamiliar, you can make a massive difference in underrepresented places, topics, and communities. Ask yourself what sort of things are unlikely to naturally get picked up on by our editor base, and take some time to go hunting for the out of the way. One excellent way to do this is to talk to groups outside of your cultural comfort zone, both on the internet and in real life. Find communities of people with different interests than you, and ask what they wish they could find more accurate information on online. Perhaps more importantly, find out what they're reading. There are countless reliable sources of information out there that are almost non-existent as citations in Wikipedia, simply because there aren't many editors around who happen to be aware of those sources. You can also ask fellow Wikipedians what they find to be missing, but you might be less likely to hear of topics which have completely escaped our collective notice so far. It's easy to think of us editors as coming from a fairly randomized cross-section of the internet, but we really aren't as diverse as one might expect. So relying solely on peers to find gaps in information can leave us completely unaware of gaping holes in our knowledge base. Another useful exercise to help tamp down personal biases is to be careful about keeping consistent internal standards with regard to notability and criteria for deletion. Pay particular attention when you write something off as niche, irrelevant, or unworthy of coverage. Is it truly irrelevant, or only irrelevant?