Meerkats inspire Wikipedia fracas
I watch precious little TV, but I had a long flight home late at night last Friday, and was brain-dead after too many hours awake but too wired to go to sleep. So I flipped the channels on Jetblue until I found myself staring at a group of a half-dozen or so of what looked like hybrid squirrel-rats, with raccoon eyes, who stood on their hind legs like begging dogs, only with an attentive, thousand-yard stare.
Meerkats. How little I knew! The show, Meerkat Manor — apparently, a big hit over on Animal Planet — follows a meerkat tribe or clan or whatever the term is. There’s a dominant female — she’s the only one allowed to breed — and a dominant male and a bunch of offspring. They hide from Kalahari predators in elaborate burrows — the title’s “manor” — but also engage in fierce territorial strife with other meerkat gangs.
Maybe it was my sleep deprivation, but I found these meerkats intensely dramatic: family tragedy, clan warfare, survival vs. the elements, all enacted by cute critters with sharp claws. The show anthropomorphizes its subjects to a degree that probably makes serious wildlife students cringe; each animal gets a name (like “Zaphod” and “Mozart” and “Flower”) and the gangs are “Whiskers” and “Lazuli” and such. In each show’s intro the meerkats are even given hushed voice-overs. But then the rest of the show proceeds in a less ridiculous, hyper-documentary mode. And fiber-optic cameras show you the action down in the burrows themselves! In this view, the meerkats all look like shoplifters caught on some dim subterranean security camera.
It was over to Wikipedia for me, to learn more. There I discovered that the show’s Wikipedia entry was under lock-down. There’d been an edit war over the meerkats! But why? Apparently some contributors posted information about some major deaths among the Whiskers in the latest season of the show. But that season hasn’t been aired yet in many places, so other contributors view the information as spoilers. And that has led to a fight. If you visit the discussion page you can follow an impassioned debate over whether it is possible to have a spoiler for a work of non-fiction.
If only the meerkats knew what mischief they were making for this strange species that’s filming them.
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August 9th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
a soap opera with meerkats.. we don’t have cable, so were ignorant of the Meerkat Manor phenomenon until visiting parents (with cable) in South Africa. That seems quite appropriate. My kids became completely besotted with it, the death/disappearance of Shakespeare had the older boy in tears. So I’d agree, I think you can have spoilers in non-fiction: it is after all a story, and such a story: dominant females, illicit sex, banishments and forgivings, murder and death, oh my. I’d lived in Africa for thirty years without having any idea that meerkats had such a rich social structure.
August 12th, 2007 at 9:19 am
I too was hooked on the meerkats from the moment I saw them!
Thank you for the post and info in the wiki entry…I was wondering what was going on over there! Hopefully, they can keep the leaks under wraps until the end of this new season…
November 24th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
i wonder what happened to the lazuli. they just disapered.someone said that youssarian got into a skrapt fight i hope he’s ok