Waluigi’s Wikipedia Weirdness

This is a post nominally about the origins of Waluigi. Alas, it will not offer any new answers about where this wonderful weirdo comes from. In the course of trying to find any, however, it will arrive at some conclusions about how bad information moves through a fandom when people don’t vet sources properly.“That sounds really dull, Drew,” you might say. I get it, but just go with me on this one.Dedicated wikis are both the lifeblood and bane of video game studies. Often, I’ll be researching some specific topic that will inevitably lead back to a wiki, and before I can even decide if it’s one of the good wikis, I will read a sentence that imparts a piece of information that flies in the face of everything I thought I knew about the subject matter in question. It’s usually bullshit, of course — sometimes put there maliciously but usually not, with some well-meaning contributor adding in a “fact” that they never bothered to look into and, for all I know, that they might not know how to…