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Monday, May 25, 2009

I -heart- Wikipedia

Looking at the previous two posts, they rely very heavily on Wikipedia, maybe even bordering on plagiarism in a few instances. I also quote it in both articles. It occurred to me as I was writing them that they could make this site a bit suspect. I'm sure we're all aware that there are sites out there that get content by copying information from other sites, linking back and forth a lot, all to increase their own search engine rankings. This has even happened to me. Information form one of my older posts got copied and pasted into someone else's 'blog' with a link back to my site.

I'm not too worried about it, but I did give me pause for a second. Really, those posts had to be Wikipedia-heavy, because if it weren't for Wikipedia I wouldn't know shit about alternate calendars or decimal time.

You know how much time I would have to have spent in a library to have gotten the same amount of information? That means, to me anyway, that I wouldn't ever have learned it without Wikipedia. The information doesn't help me live my life in any significantly better way, it's just interesting. As such, it's not worth digging through books for. When it's only a few clicks away though, think of how much more I can learn in much less time.

Thank you Wikipedia, thank you Internet. That's all I have to say.

David

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