Extolling the virtues of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a community edited encyclopedia. What does that mean? It means that anyone, yes, even you, could go to any page on the Wikipedia site and edit the entry. Find a misspelling or grammatical error? Then you can edit it. Because anyone can create an entry, the site is fairly comprehensive. The site has everything: from entries which you would expect to find in a traditional encyclopedia (Karl Marx), to slang (white trash), to proofs of mathematical theorems (Cantor’s diagonal argument), to even mundane things, like pencil sharpener.
Because anyone can edit anything on the site, controversial entries (gun control, gay marriage) tend to be free of explicit bias in one direction or another. On the flip side, because only volunteers add and edit articles, it tends to be rather tech-heavy: the entry for Microsoft is longer than the entry for World War II.
But give it a shot, search for things you know about and see how accurate it is. And with all of the links between entries, it’s great for browsing; I spent a half and hour to an hour reading about ancient Babylonian gods the other day.
May 18th, 2004 at 11:47 am
Oh, I almost forgot. Here’s the Wikipedia entry for John Wilson. (I can’t help but note that this guy has the same birthday as me.)
May 18th, 2004 at 1:08 pm
Yeah, I have to say that Wikipedia’s quite cool. I was reading about Surrey (where I was born) and got annoyed enough at grammatical errors that I just had to fix them. Maybe now I’ll edit the actual content to reflect more accurately on Surrey. The definition that’s in there is lifted from Surrey’s official website, so it’s a little slanted.