Title text: ""This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke.""
Meta
The source of this answer contains three links to http://xkcd.com/917/: this one, the one before, and the one before the one before the latter one mentioned in this sentence.
</meta>
Another picture worth a thousand words:
[![The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters.][3]][4]
Title text: "The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters."
Basically, for something to be 'meta' in [common] usage, it must satisfy at least one of the following conditions:
- It is self referential.
- It is recursive.
- It is about something.
""This is the reference implementation of the self-referential joke."" [2]: http://xkcd.com/917/ [3]: http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/self_description.png "The contents of any one panel are dependent on the contents of every panel including itself. The graph of panel dependencies is complete and bidirectional, and each node has a loop. The mouseover text has two hundred and forty-two characters." [4]: http://xkcd.com/688/
