Boo-Boo Bear, A Wikipedia Edit Skirmish

On the 24th of August 2007 a Wikipedian called Tomajko first created the stub page for Boo-Boo bear, which simply said:

Boo Boo is a fictional anthropomorpic animated bear, that first made his appearance on The Huckleberry Hound Show on the Yogi Bear Segment. He is best friends with Yogi.

Even as someone possessing only passing familiarity with this topic, I am relieved Boo-Boo’s page wasn’t left in this state. As the months passed various sundry details were added, but disappointingly no one was prepared to grapple with the essential nature of Boo-Boo.

At last, almost exactly two years after the page was created, an anonymous user added this interesting observation:

Boo Boo would appear to be a juvenile.

The following winter, user SkippyTheSkeptic lived up to his or her name by redrafting this as follows:

It is not readily apparent whether Boo-Boo is a juvenile bear with a precocious intellect or simply and [sic] adult bear who is short of stature.

This bold assertion of Boo-Boo’s dichotomous ambiguity was too much for a TimberWolf Railz, who almost immediately added [Citation Needed].

Then an anonymous user appeared to collapse the uncertainty in a single masterstroke:

There are numerous notices on that fact, in the episode “Club Scout Boo-Boo”, in which Yogi tries to persuade Boo-Boo to become a Boy Scout. Boo-Boo declines the offer, but Yogi corrects himself by saying that he will be joining the “Cub Scouts”, in [sic] which Boo-Boo accepts.

The matter apparently settled, so things remained until the autumn of 2015, when Mulalubaba made this curious alteration (italics mine):

… but Yogi corrects him by saying that he will be joining the “Cub Scouts”, which Boo-Boo would obviously accept.

This change was passed off as “minor edits to make it better”, an outrageous subterfuge. Now we are left unaware as to whether Boo-Boo gives any indication of acceptance. Mulalubaba has destroyed all clarity, leaving only the implication that we ought to take it that Boo-Boo would accept on the basis of some a priori handwaving.

Shockingly, nothing was done about this until June 2020 when Toughpigs took the initiative and simply deleted the entire sentence about the Cub Scouts.

And so the controversy abaited, until an extrardinary intervention by IllegalAction019 in May 2026, described as merely a “Visual edit”:

It is currently unclear whether Boo-Boo is a juvenile bear with a precocious intellect, or simply an adult bear who is short of stature.

Now it reads like breathless live coverage of unfolding news event. Although to those of us who’ve followed the development of this page from the beginning, there is an obvious irony to the phrasing: in 2010, a simpler time, we thought we had it all figured out with that Boy Scouts thing. But that was the Garden of Eden, and we are now cast out.