Today there’s no comic strip, just a fucking rant. Actually, the first incarnation of the NLDD was a newsletter full of fucking rants. So here’s to nostalgia.

And Wikipedia.

Because you know how those fucking open-source hippies have been touting Wikipedia’s superiority over other encyclopedias because of its community-based concept? Yeah, you heard those alright. You probably wanted to punch them in the face, too. You know, these are the hippies that actually think that anything free built by some kind of community is somehow superior to anything else. You’d think most of them would have joined some spin-off Mormon cult by now and left us alone but, well, not everything always goes as you’d like.

Anyway, Wikipedia, they say, is more reliable than, say, the venerable Encylopedia Britannica, which was written by fucking british people with beards and glasses which is pretty much the definition of a fucking expert that knows what the fuck he’s talking about (well, at least in Hollywood movies). They’ll show you studies and such and, yeah, okay, whatever, let’s assume this is all true.

But when you take into account the temporal aspect, it goes a bit like this:

Every now and then, there’s an edit that adds errors on some pages. It could be because of a typo, because of an omission, because of a poorly phrased statement or because you shouldn’t drink and edit Wikipedia. It could be because of vandalism, or because of information manipulation. It could be because somebody wants to win an argument with his buddies so he modifies Wikipedia and tells everyone “see? Wikipedia says I’m right!”. Whatever the reason, this could happen to any page that isn’t locked, which is pretty much any page on Wikipedia except sensitive subjects like Hitler or Creationism or Lolcats. And it takes anything from an hour to a couple days for the page to be fixed.

So yeah, on average, most of the time, you get some pretty good source of information… but you could be the guy who happens to check Wikipedia on the wrong day, at the wrong time, which can’t happen with Britannica. It could fucking happen to you.

Similarly, open-source software is supposedly better than proprietary software. You know how that hippie song goes: bugs are fixed faster, support can be found quicker on forums, and yaddi yadda. Okay, sure, whatever, let’s assume it’s the case (because, well, you know, proprietary software has to go through those stupid things called “testing” and “backwards compatibility checks” and other useless things that only slow down the creative process of writing free pieces of crap that don’t work, as opposed to proprietary pieces of crap that at least work sometimes). But every now and then, there’s a bug that goes unfixed for years. You’ve seen those endless threads on Ubuntu Forums that were created back in 1966, and you’ve heard about those flamewars on the glibc mailing list about how anybody requesting a particular feature is just a fucking moron and can put that feature up his rectum (and this is almost an actual quote).

Comparing feature implementation and bug fixing between proprietary and open-source systems kinda looks like this:

If you’re unlucky, the bug you’re concerned about could be one of those bugs that fucking take years to get fixed, or may still not be fixed to this day because nobody’s fucking interested in it, and everybody tells you to fire up Emacs and fix it yourself, and then somebody says you should use Vim instead, and then it all goes to shit and you’re left there wondering what the fuck just happened. Sometimes, you get your hopes up as a guy asks you to send him some logs using a fucked up command line he just pulled out of his ass, but then after 3 replies he disappears and you realize somebody just hacked into your Gmail account.

Sure, those unfixed bugs may be because of some piece of hardware that has proprietary specs or whatever other lame excuse those hippies come up with these days, but at the end of the day: it could fucking happen to you.

Now I know what you’re thinking.

“It could fucking happen to you”.

It sounds like some fucking evil FUD-spreading corporate salesman from IBM or Microsoft or whatever.

Well, fuck you. It’s FUD alright, because it fucking happened to me.

I’m the one who checked the Wikipedia page at the wrong moment, with mistakes subtle enough that I get the wrong information without noticing (and don’t go all “you should check the references” on me, the point of Wikipedia is to not do the fucking research yourself, you moron). I’m also the one whose laptop still doesn’t fucking suspend nor hibernate under any fucking Linux distribution I’ve tried for the past 5 years (and it has actually gone worse lately: Linux is actually draining the fucking battery while the fucking laptop is supposed to be fucking turned off!).

So yeah, I get Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt every time I fucking read Wikipedia. I get Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt every time I boot Linux. I get plenty of FUD and you’re right, it’s not nice.

So fuck you. And yeah, it could still happen to you.