Tuesday, June 8, 2021

A touching explanation for why the Wikipedia entry for Scrappy-Doo is 25,623 words long, longer than the entry for Poland

Amelia Tait investigated and found a touching story:

Sat on the sofa, ignoring the movie, I marvelled at the size of the sidebar as I scrolled: the grey progress indicator was short and slow. I clicked on the edit history of the page – while a number of people have contributed to the article over the years, I saw one unregistered user’s IP address repeated over and over again. Almost every day between 22 May and 29 October 2020, this user had added something new to the page.

There’s no way to message an unregistered Wikipedia user; there were no clues about the Scrappy-Doo enthusiast in the string of nine numbers that made up their default username. With little hope it would amount of anything, I left a comment on the user’s “Talk” page

...

“I was interested in him and I related to him on a personal level because I have high functioning autism – I have a hard time reading people,” she explains. “There was this scene early on when they finished watching a horror movie and Scrappy was telling Scooby about how exciting the scary part was. He was having such a great time and Scooby was terrified.

“I could just tell that Scrappy couldn’t read Scooby. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! He’s like me.’”