Rabbit Hole

Here at the end of 2024 I’m reorganizing my files and moving on to a new computer. Part of this process means finishing orphaned projects, leading to the inevitable rabbit-holing that caused much of the orphaning in the first place.

Rabbit-holing can be healthy and useful if it turns up new material or leads. It can also be indulgent to the point of paralysis, leading deep into burrows that offer only the cold, damp sensation of the crypt. Down here, there is no sunlight.

I’m happy to say that today’s rabbit hole went only two levels deep despite the potential to go so much further. Updating my “Article Tracker” with a new category – Conspiracies – I came up with the question: What is the current status of QAnon?

The invisible hand of mercy seems to have covered the mouths of those nincompoops responsible for QAnon, but maybe I was missing something. Wikipedia provided me the first landing page for an update and I took the bait – a nice, mainstream, crowd-sourced channel of information.

What surprised me about the page was its sheer volume. We’re talking about a phenomenon that started in 2017, with roots only as old as 2016’s “Pizzagate,” and effectively “ends” around 2022 with the last so-called Q-drop.

Meanwhile Wikipedia’s page dedicated to QAnon scrolls for miles, cites over 500 references, and is available in 42 languages. This unscientific observation required some research to understand how the QAnon page compared to other Wikipedia entries, and that, my friends was level two of the rabbit hole.

Turns out the average size of Wikipedia’s 64 million articles (7M in English) is just 688 words. The median length is about half that amount.

How many words and bytes are dedicated to QAnon? Over 15,000 words and 358,761 bytes. Wikipedia’s article on the JFK Assassination, meanwhile, runs just under 9,000 words, not counting citations (333) and footnotes, and comes in at 158,499 bytes. Even World War II gets less ink than QAnon with its 14k words, 255k bytes, and just over 400 references (though its offered in 232 languages, against 56 for JFK).

As to the original question about the current status of QAnon, it appears that while the last Q-drop appeared in 2022, the movement or community or whatever it is still lives and breathes. To find out for sure, the place to look might be 8-Chan or Reddit.

But I aint headed down those rabbit holes.

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