Wikipedia is one of those rare digital miracles that feels like it live up to the vast promise of the web: a vast online encyclopedia, written and maintained by millions of volunteers across the world, in arguably the most extraordinary single repository of knowledge in human history.
But of course, because any unverified user can edit Wikipedia, it’s often become subject to vandalism. In a particularly meta twist, the page for “brain rot” — let’s just go with Wikipedia’s definition, which is the “negative cognitive, emotional, and/or behavioral consequences” of consuming content that’s “trivial, simplistic, or low in quality” — has been defaced so much that it’s now protected against public edits until early next year.
And specifically what it’s been defaced with? Pure, unadulterated brain rot — like this edit, from back in February 2025, when the page was replaced with references to the brain rot mainstay Skibidi Toilet and Donald Trump, along with the phrase “Goofy ahh brainrot 💀” repeated 96 times in succession.
Other messages on the page have included “ALL HAIL THE SKÎBÎDÎ TOÎLÊT” and “BRAIN ROT WILL DESTROY THIS NEXT GENERATION” — no argument there — and moving the page to a new entry, called “Prain dot.”
Finally, in August, an editor classified the page as “semi-protected,” meaning it can’t be altered by unregistered users or those whose accounts aren’t confirmed. The restriction is currently slated to hold until January 2025.
Wikipedia vandals have been tampering with pages since the dawn of the site’s existence back in 2001. Some is clever, some is dark — and a lot, as you saw above, is just insulting stupid.
Fortunately, Wikipedia’s volunteers have a reputation for swiftly fixing the digital defacement. In 2021, it took just minutes to correct 53,000 pages that had been plastered with swastikas. In the end, we have no doubt that the page on brain rot will be resilient as well.
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