Answer: Hotel Wikipedia

Although not official in the sense that it has been formally adopted by the founders and contributors of Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki—the Wiki about Wikipedia—has a listing for a tongue-in-cheek “official” theme song for the popular online encyclopedia.

The theme song, an adaptation of The Eagles’ hit Hotel California, features the following lyrics—presented here in full so that you can enjoy just how well done they are.

It’s definitely a challenge to read them without singing the words along to the Hotel California tune.

On a dark office evening,
Sat down in my chair.
Sharp smell of stale coffee
Circling round in the air.
Suddenly on the webpage
There came a flickering light.
My head grew heavy, and my sight grew dim;
I had to stop for the night.
There it was in the link list:
“Edit page; you’ll do well”
And I was thinking to myself
This could be Heaven or this could be Hell!
Then it lit up the quickbar
And it showed me the way.
There were pages begging for clean-up;
I thought I heard them say:

Welcome to the Hotel Wikipedia
Such a lovely place
So much empty space
Plenty of work at the Hotel Wikipedia
Any time of year
You can find us here…

Its structure’s maze-passage twisted;
No one knows where it ends.
It’s got a lot of money mirror sites,
That it calls friends.
And in the dance of the pages
Editors sweat –
Some change to remember,
Some change to forget.
So I chose Contributions,
Tell me, what have I done?
And it said:
This is all that you’ve been good for, here,
since two thousand and one.
And still those pages beg changes
From far away,
Keep you up in the middle of the night
Just to hear them say…

Welcome to the Hotel Wikipedia
Such a lovely place
So much empty space
They’re typing it in at the Hotel Wikipedia
Things that you can do—
Revert vandals, too—

Many links in the Portal
Disambigs won’t suffice
And users said,
We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device.
And in the Most Requested
The list of pages increased;
They edit with their steely knives
But they just can’t kill the beast.
Last thing I remember,
I couldn’t take any more.
I had to find the passage back
to the life I had before
Relax, said the Rambot,
We are programmed to receive.
You can log out any time you like
But you can never leave.

Sadly, our best efforts to locate an actual performance of the song, partial or in full, have been in vain. Should we come across one, however, we assure you that we’ll update this trivia entry to share the joy.