Wikipedia

[Ferrari333SP]

Here are the pages about Top Gear on Wikipedia

Top Gear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Gear

Jeremy Clarkson: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Clarkson

James May: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_May

Richard Hammond: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hammond

The Stig: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stig

Good reading I'd say.

[No Boss]

Wikipedia is awesome, it has given me an "A" on many a book report.

For the petrolheads there is a wikipedia based site, thats still in the works, based on all the racetracks in the world. Trackapedia.org or somthing like it, sounds like great homework to do the night before a track day.

[flyingfridge]

That article about the Stig is excellent reading. I didn't realise that other people had masqueraded as the Stig. It must be said though, that the owner of the MC12 must have been a pretty decent driver to beat the Stig's Enzo time. Pity about the F1 car though. I really had hoped that the Stig had actually driven it. It makes sense though, if I were Renault, I wouldn't let anyone other than my employed drivers near my million dollar babies...

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

It appears that some rarer, privately owned cars may be driven by their owner, masquerading as the Stig. This was the case for the Maserati MC12, privately owned by Frank Mountain, a successful property developer; the car was at the time the only one in the country. Heikki Kovalainen (the Renault F1 test driver) admitted to driving the Renault R24 F1 car around the track in the 2004 series, clothed as the Stig.

[zenkidori]

Wikipedia helped me never study for a single class during my first semester of College and get nothing lower than a B.

The Renault story makes that lap less cool.

[Buba]

Originally Posted by flyingfridge

That article about the Stig is excellent reading. I didn't realise that other people had masqueraded as the Stig. It must be said though, that the owner of the MC12 must have been a pretty decent driver to beat the Stig's Enzo time. Pity about the F1 car though. I really had hoped that the Stig had actually driven it. It makes sense though, if I were Renault, I wouldn't let anyone other than my employed drivers near my million dollar babies...

Frank Mountain has TONS of Ferraris... Even a 2003 F1 car... He also paticipated in the 24h Le Mans... He is up for the job, I believe...

Still, that make you wonder how good the Stig is...

[bone]

^idd, i was thinking that as well

ferrari let tiff drive their F1 car after all, why wouldn't renault let a former F1 driver drive their car? unless he does come from a rally background like the wikitext proposed (i never taught in this direction before), and that could also explain why the stig uses a different line than the F1 drivers that went around the track

[hajj]

Tiff also drove the Williams in the last series.
Renault might have been scared at that point to let anyone else drive their car, simply because of the outstanding starts Renaults did in 2004. You dont really want others to know your secrets. Their launch procedure was actually quite strange in 2004, cant really remember how it exactly worked though

[teeb]

I love this bit in the James May entry...

During the early nineties May worked as a sub-editor for Autocar magazine. During an interview with Richard Allinson on BBC Radio 2 (6th January 2006) he confessed that he was fired in 1992 from the magazine after putting together a "hidden message" in one issue. At the end of the year the magazine's "Road Test Year Book" supplement was published. Each spread featured four car reviews and each review started with a large, red, drop-capital letter. May's role was to put the whole supplement together, which "was extremely boring and took several months". He went on to say:

"So I had this idea that if I re-edited the beginnings of all the little tests, I could make these red letters spell out a message through the magazine - which I thought was brilliant. I can't remember exactly what it said but it was to the effect that "You might think this is a really great thing but if you were sitting here making it up you'd realise it's a real pain in the arse." It took me about two months to do it and on the day that it came out I'd actually forgotten that I'd done it because there's a bit of a gap between it being "put to bed" and coming out on the shelves. When I arrived at work that morning everybody was looking at their shoes and I was summoned to the managing director of the company's office. The thing had come out and nobody at work had spotted what I'd done because I'd made the words work around the pages so you never saw a whole word. But all the readers had seen it and they'd written in thinking they'd won a prize or a car or something."

Sounds like such a James thing to do!

[KryptonZone]

Isn't this a repost? I'm sure I've read this here before when soemone first stuck TG on Wiki...

[jensked]

definitely, but i'm not gonna spoil their fun.

[massy]

Originally Posted by flyingfridge

That article about the Stig is excellent reading. I didn't realise that other people had masqueraded as the Stig. It must be said though, that the owner of the MC12 must have been a pretty decent driver to beat the Stig's Enzo time. Pity about the F1 car though. I really had hoped that the Stig had actually driven it. It makes sense though, if I were Renault, I wouldn't let anyone other than my employed drivers near my million dollar babies...

This Frank Mountain isn't that good, on Fifth Gear he crashed his MC12. It was kind of a laugh though, he went on a track completely covered in snow and lost control in like the fourth corner or so.
He looked at the scratches and went home in the car (he actually drove it halfway through the country and back for the filming).

[Chupacabras]

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Clarkson

http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hammond

[toma_alimosh]

wikipedia is not a reliable source at all ... the whole world can edit every single thing on Wikipedia ... I can go on there now and write that Jeremy Clarkson is the Stig, and it would appear on the article being viewed, without even one step of editing by anybody as to what I added to the article.
Wikipedia is useless .
Oh, and I believe this is a repost, isn't it ?

[Chupacabras]

agreed - i tell people all the time that they CAN NOT use wikipedia as a source on a paper, but they insist on it! Its fine for looking up information that might be interesting, but youre right, its not peer reviewed, and you have to take all the 'facts' with a grain of salt.

[BlaRo]

Originally Posted by vladmitu

wikipedia is not a reliable source at all ... the whole world can edit every single thing on Wikipedia ... I can go on there now and write that Jeremy Clarkson is the Stig, and it would appear on the article being viewed, without even one step of editing by anybody as to what I added to the article.
Wikipedia is useless .
Oh, and I believe this is a repost, isn't it ?

You could do that, but Hundreds of thousands of people view a Wikipedia article at any given moment, and if there are blatant inaccuracies they will be removed by rolling back the article to its previous state. Blatant misinformation is removed quickly by pageviewers, and recently edited articles appear on a list where Wikipedia members can review them for inaccuracies. By distributing an article's content over a large group of people who have the ability to revise it, Wikipedia becomes slowly more factual. And less useless.

Some of the articles are written by known experts, like the one on global warming. Hell, Clarkson could write an article on himself!

[toma_alimosh]

If he did then we'd get a quote from Clarkson writing an article about himself, like:
"I like the great roar of the Aston Martin V8 Vantage and I hate Spunk."
just like a description by Hammond:
"I am a driving God!!"
or by May:
"I prefer not to run on television, it's not the manner of a gentleman,"
lol

[Janus]

Yes, Wikipedia is great, but must be taken with a grain of salt. I certainly would never dare us it as a reference for university work.

It reminds me of the time my brother had to write a paper on the Geneva convention for an international law subject. He got loads of really good, accurate information from a site but then decided not to reference it as it came from the Official Hogan's Hero's fan site. No matter how much I tried I could convince him to take the chance at submitting it.

This is what one of my friend posted about himself in Wikipedia.

[Evo7]

Can I have his autograph now he's famous.


I wonder where the information that is correct comes from. Their stalkers?

[KryptonZone]

Wiki is actually not as bad as you think. It has been published in many major intenational scientific journals that the free online encyclopaedia is actually better than Britannica due to it being up-to-date and limitless as opposed to Britannica's limited number of pages. Check the article out on CNN.com, just search for Wikipedia. 8)

[Chupacabras]

It is a good resource for some things, you just cant cite it.