15 Most Bizarre Articles Hiding On Wikipedia
12. Gävle Goat
Every year in Gävle, Sweden, a giant goat is erected for the Christmas season, and it turns out it's one of the biggest targets of vandalism in the world. This incredible article lists everything that happened to the display year by year for the past five decades. Instead of skipping uneventful seasons, the bullet points include items like "1981: Nothing happened."
The timeline keeps escalating like a crazy teen comedy to the point that it's hard to believe this is real. The Gävle goat is burnt down, reconstructed, burnt down again, put back up, hit by a car, destroyed with fireworks, and the one time they made it fireproof, people just broke it into pieces instead.
It's like a modern day version of the story of Job, and although vandalism is always unfortunate, how can you not laugh at the town's continued efforts to save a straw goat to no avail? Even after they installed webcams to monitor the thing 24/7, that didn't really help, and some guy burnt it down thinking doing so was a town tradition and wasn't illegal.
The absolute best quote is definitely from the 2005 entry: "Burnt by unknown vandals reportedly dressed as Santa and the gingerbread man, by shooting a flaming arrow at the goat at 21:00 on 3 December."