SAN FRANCISCO. As Wikipedia prepared to black out its site for 24 hours on Wednesday in protest against anti-piracy legislation, a state of emergency was declared in however many countries there are in the world, a question only Wikipedia now has the answer to. “We must come to terms with the fact that Wikipedia is currently the vault of all human knowledge,” said communications academic Egbert Dorklestein. “Without it, we are basically back to wallowing in the primordial soup.”
The world’s population woke on Wednesday morning to find that millennia of intellectual evolution and wisdom-gathering had been wiped out overnight, as internet reference source Wikipedia issued a 24-hour blackout.
“We’re all screwed,” confirmed Dorklestein. “All six billion and something of us. I wish I could tell you the global population figure more accurately, but I literally have nowhere to turn for it.”
Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced encyclopaedia which launched at some point probably within the last decade, is very possibly though not certainly the planet’s first centralised bank of information. Before Wikipedia, people searching for knowledge about the world around them were forced to seek it from books whose titles unfortunately are currently inaccessible, and by asking old people, whose memories were often unreliable due to those mental conditions old people get, you know the ones.
“The only historical analogy with Wikipedia is that there used to be some kind of sacred rock or tablet or tea-towel or something that ancient peoples used to record wisdom passed down the ages,” said Dorklestein. “I think.”
The first signs of the apocalyptic effects of the Wikipedia blackout were witnessed in the closure of all judicial courts and medical facilities as of midnight on Tuesday evening.
“What, like I’m meant to carry the law in my head?” said Boston litigator Schmarmie Basted. “I just Wikipedia the shit I need. Murder’s not allowed, right?”
Medical professionals concurred. “My last patient walked in with some condition involving sneezing, a sore throat and aches and pains,” said Berlin-based GP Agnetha von Malpraktis. “The diagnosis was on the tip of my tongue, but without Wikipedia to verify I couldn’t take any chances so I just stuck her on a nuclear course of chemotherapy to be safe.”
Some of the worst effects of Wikipedia’s unavailability were felt within the spheres of academia and journalism.
“Our lead story today is how to tell if it’s raining,” confessed a spokesperson for the BBC. “We’re pretty confident that that’s when there’s water falling from the sky, but don’t sue us if we’ve got it the wrong way round.”
Politicians the world over pledged extraordinary measures to ensure that the disaster is not repeated in future.
“As a back-up, I propose the creation of an unprecedented project where ordinary people around the globe, without any special qualifications, can freely contribute their knowledge to a single online information repository,” said UK Prime Minister David Cameron.
“As far as we know there’s never been anything like that before.”
