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Collecting Twitter’s funniest facts without Wikipedia

If Wikipedia can’t verify a statement, does that make it a fact? These Twitter users seem to think so. 

Photo of Fernando Alfonso III

Fernando Alfonso III

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Wikipedia may be down in protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act, but that hasn’t stopped people on Twitter from sharing their worldly knowledge.

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(Or from finding a workaround: Just press the escape key right before the splash page loads.)

Over the last eight hours, tweeters have been using #FactsWithoutWikipedia to post some jokes inspired by the online encyclopedia. So far more than 35,000 people have weighed in using the worldwide trending hashtag.

In Wikipedia’s absence, Microsoft Encarta, a digital encyclopedia popular in the 1990s, has made a comeback—at least on Twitter. A parody account, @encarta95, has been poking fun at the Wikipedia blackout over that same time period.

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“Have you been able to find all the information you’ve needed during the blackout??” @encarta95 tweeted.Encarta will never black you out! :-)”

Here are some other tweets that caught the Daily Dot’s attention.

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Illustration by Fernando Alfonso III

 
The Daily Dot