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Five most fascinating Wikipedia lists

Mike Pollitt | Thursday 3 February, 2011 10:31

Wikipedia is 10 years old, and to celebrate its wholly deserved rise to ubiquity, here are five treasure troves from the site which should keep you amused for about a year each. Get lost in there why don’t you?

List of Paraphilias
Paraphilia is a fancy word for sexual deviancy. I think that’s all you need to know. If any Wikipedia page could ever be unsuitable for work, then this is probably it. Don’t go getting any ideas now…

Butterflies of Great Britain
Butterflies are beautiful, aren’t they? And so symbolic. Did you know the Ancient Greek word for butterfly was the same as their word for soul? Or that Vladimir Nabokov was a committed lepidopterist? Snipe did, but then we’ve just been reading about them on Wikipedia. Anyway this list has lots of pretty photos. Our favourite: the Purple Emperor

Self identifying alcoholics
Where does F. Scott Fitzgerald rub shoulders with Keith Chegwin? Where does Buster Keaton buy a round for Clarissa Dickson Wright? Here, that’s where.

World War II Deception Operations
This is worth it for the names alone. Operation Ironside, Operation Fortitude, the unbelievably sinister Operation Blumenpflücken (Flower Picking). Perhaps the most amazing is Operation Mincemeat which is too outrageous to recount here, involving as it does washed up corpses and faked overdraft demands. Read it, it’s amazing.

Polymaths
This will make you feel a bit sick. Sample entry: Isaac Asimov (1920–1992); Having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards, his works have been published in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System. Bastard.

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