It has been in the back of my mind to begin collecting some of the more bizarre bits of writing which show up in Wikipedia (all released under a GNU public license and thus fair game) with the idea of eventually creating a mash-up of them into something strange and (perhaps) wonderful. Many of them are almost surreal to begin with, so nearly incoherent (or even so inchoate) is their prose. Here's a paragraph I stumbled upon today in the article on the Los Angeles suburb of Pomona:
USA Today done a news article in 2002 on Pomona was the kind of "Older suburbs" associated with intruding urban blight. The Pomona City Council came into defense (but shown the article was "offensive") about their city. The references on crime, drugs, gangs, racial issues and poverty rates are said "untrue" and based more on stereotypes than actual 2000 census data on Pomona shows otherwise, a generally safe diverse middle-class city.That's bound to be edited out of the Wikipedia eventually, and it just cries out to be preserved, like one of those deformed creatures or body parts put in jars and displayed in 19th century curio cabinets and museums of oddities. Hey, I could start Rejectomorph's Digital Museum of Wikipedian Abominations! Some of them are almost weird enough to be used in spam e-mail to bypass the Bayesian filters.
Edit: Or, conversely, spam such as this might easily be mistaken for prose from Wikipedia. (Heh. If someone were to copy and paste that into a WP article, I wonder how long it would take for anybody to notice it?)
