The Beer Flood and Wikipedia’s Weirdest Corners

In 1814, a tidal wave of more than three hundred thousand gallons of beer flooded the streets of London, drowning nine people. A real, actual, deadly beer flood. It feels a lot like what we found with Sarah Goodridge's tiny, scandalous self-portrait last time we talked, doesn't it? Another one of those stories that sounds completely made up, but is hiding right there in the historical record, just waiting for someone to click on it. And that’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about. How do you even FIND a story like that? You imagine someone just… stumbles upon it. But on Wikipedia, with its seven million articles, stumbling isn't a strategy.

It’s a lottery ticket. No, there’s a system. There’s a whole secret menu for finding the gloriously weird stuff. It’s literally called "Wikipedia:Unusual articles." And its own description is perfect. It says these are articles that are, quote, "verifiable, valuable contributions... but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something one would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica." I love that. It’s an official acknowledgement that some facts are important precisely because they’re WEIRD. They don't fit in a neat box. The beer flood is on that list. So is the story of Pope Benedict the Ninth, who became pope at twenty, sold the papacy, got it back, lost it again, and then became pope a THIRD time.

You can’t make this stuff up. So you have this curated list of oddities, which is amazing. But then you have people who have turned exploring it into an art form. There’s this woman, Annie Rauwerda, who started a project called "Depths of Wikipedia" back in 2020. And what she does is basically what we’re all trying to do when we fall down an internet rabbit hole, except she’s a professional. She uses the "random article" button. She scours that "Unusual articles" list. She even takes suggestions from her followers. She’s like a deep-sea explorer for forgotten facts, pulling these things up into the light. And she’s so good at it she’s got fans like Neil Gaiman.

Her whole process reminds me of something much older. It’s like a modern cabinet of curiosities—a Wunderkammer. Back in the Renaissance, collectors would fill rooms with things that didn’t have a category. A strange fossil next to a work of art next to a supposed dragon's tooth. They were collections that celebrated the unexplainable, the things that broke the rules. That’s what this corner of Wikipedia is. It’s a digital Wunderkammer. It’s where you find the homework of a seven-year-old boy named Onfim from the thirteen-hundreds — his little doodles and writing exercises preserved on birch bark for SEVEN HUNDRED years.

It’s where you find the "Phantom time conspiracy theory," a completely serious, though widely rejected, argument by a historian who claims that about three hundred years of the early middle ages were just… invented. He argues the year is actually 1729. It’s bonkers! But it’s a documented, verifiable thing. And this is the part that gets me. The existence of these pages isn’t a bug in the system. It’s not a sign of Wikipedia’s unreliability. In fact, they have all these systems to filter out junk, like the Top 25 Report which automatically flags articles with suspicious traffic patterns to weed out bots. No, these weird articles are rigorously fact-checked.

The beer flood, the pope who sold his job, the medieval kid’s homework—they’re all real. They’re just… unusual. They represent a totally different way of thinking about what knowledge is. An old-school encyclopedia was top-down. A handful of experts decided what was important enough to include. Wikipedia is the opposite. It’s bottom-up. It’s a sprawling, chaotic, collective brain. And in that brain, the fact that nine people drowned in beer is just as verifiable as the date of the Battle of Hastings. It proves that our shared history isn't just a clean timeline of kings and wars. It's a messy, bizarre, and deeply human collection of stories.

And the weirdest ones—the ones that would never have made it into the Encyclopædia Britannica—might just be the ones that tell us the most about who we are. They’re the texture. They’re the proof that the story of us is stranger, funnier, and more surprising than any official account would have you believe.