Wikipedia

[SFG75]

I'm a big fan of this site, I absolutely love it. The Atlantic has an excellent article by Marshall Poe which details the interesting history of wikipedia. One of the most fascinating parts detail how contributors early on had skirmishes with the owner regarding some of the content. Interestingly enough, this became the first *flame war* on the internet. The owner had a 'hands off' approach to moderating and found that in doing so, his actual grasp of things increased. Jeremy Rifkin and Alvin Toffler have written of how empowering the net will become. To me, the story of wikipedia is confirmation of their theories. Any big fans or detractors of wikipedia? Any commentary on the article?

 

[bren]

Yeah, I use this constantly. My son (14) introduced me to it and it's so fabulous. I'm constantly finding him reading articles on crazedly specialized fields. He keeps linking off physics, chemistry, linguistic, and religious articles and ends up with freakin oddball headings. Great though. I just look stuff up.

There was a PBS interview about this subject, but I don't have time to try and find it to post the link.

 

[Occlith]

I often look for articles in Wikipedia. It's useful for getting quick information on many subjects, especially popular culture.
When doing research, I usually check other resources, as I do not entirely trust all of Wiki's content.

 

[Mattyj]

I love Wikipedia and use it all the time. It's really handy, especially for popular culture stuff, as Occlith stated. I have yet to come up with a fruitless search on Wiki.

Thanks for linking the article. The process of how it came to be is quite interesting. Amusing little tidbit regarding the accuracy of Wikipedia compared to Britannica too.

 

[tundra]

I'm a big fan of wikipedia as well. Coincidentally, I was reading an article on that site moments ago before I switched back to b&r and saw this new thread.

As for fruitless searches...I looked myself up once. There exists a British film dubbing editor with my exact name (who also happens to only work on titles that sound scandelous). We are both dim in the bright lights of wikipedia. Alas.

 

[Prairie_Girl]

We have wikipedia as our homepage. I'm constantly ending up reading about the most random things on the planet.

 

[tartan_skirt]

I love Wikipedia and can sometimes find myself editting random pages at the oddest hours of the day. I do get irritated by the amount of vandalism though.

 

[pink shadow]

We all seem to agree here! I also love Wikipedia and have started to use it as a verb: "I don't know, I'll have to wikipedia that" .

 

[Mattyj]

We all seem to agree here! I also love Wikipedia and have started to use it as a verb: "I don't know, I'll have to wikipedia that" .

lol I do that too.

 

[mrkgnao]

I agree: what did we do before Wiki? But let's not forget there's e.g. http://www.bartleby.com and http://www.pantheon.org/ too! (or is it just me who mostly looks things up on mythology and phrase&fable? ) And have you seen that Wiki has, among many other things, Wikisource and Wikiquote too?

At least, quoting Wikipedia is better than the Swedish journalist who had it that "Google reports that....." No, it doesn't. Google finds you pages that report that.... There's a difference. Dot dot dot.

*mrkgnao*

 

[Fantasy Moon]

I don't really use it all that much to be truthful. Usually if someone has included a link to an article there to demonstrate a point is about the only time that I visit the place.

 

[grit]

I love wikipedia too, but I am old enough and far enough past a thorough education to be able to sift thru the dubious info that sometimes shows up there. I shudder to think of young people using it as a definitive source.

One of the neat things you can do is set up your own user page. I teach college and have all of my course outlines on my page that link thru to the definitions of terms and concepts. I also have external links set up to all of the course documents for downloading. This saves on needless print-outs and is handy for students that lose or misplace documents. Unlike some other educational and school servers, they can access this page from anywhere.

 

[-Carlos-]

Wikipedia is one of my favorite sites on the Internet.

 

[Shai]

Wikipedia's great and very useful.

I was reading somwhere about it, from an economist's POV. I thing he was explaining that as W. was growing it stood more to benefit from a free mode of control. But as it grows bigger and bigger, the possible benefits drop relative to the possible "threats". That's why, for example, you'll now find that wikipedia isn't as free as it used to be. You can't just edit any thread. Some entries are considered to be high targets for vanadalism, and as such, you can only suggest changes.

Nevermind, the idea's pretty, I hope it lasts. Plus its all so useful.