Pitching in on homework today, we’re researching: Extatosoma tiaratum. Otherwise known as macleay’s spectre. It’s like a praying mantis, but bigger and scarier.

It’s a real bug. You can buy them and breed them. You can find them in Australia. But, amazingly enough, you can’t find them on wikipedia. Not found. Not by latin name, not by common name. Nothing.

This has never happened to me before. Maybe an obscure concept or semi-famous celebrity was missing, but a real bug?

The fact that I was aghast when I discovered this reinforces how amazing wikipedia is. How much it has changed not just homework, but everything.

When everything (except macleay’s spectre) is a click away, it changes the way we think about information.

(Wanna bet how long it takes for this omission to be corrected? I say 22 hours.)

[PS Florian Gross points us to the German edition where the article lives quite happily!]