Digital Analogue

Wikipedia

I'd just like to say that Wikipedia rocks my little world. I checked it out a while back and at the time it was a neat idea, but not very full-fledged. Now, though? It has an incredible range of stuff.

When I was little, I remember many happy hours of reading the encyclopedia. Typically, they started with me looking up something for a school assignment. And then the next entry. And then the next one after that. And eventually, Mom would walk in to the room and yell at me to work on what I was supposed to be working on.

I don't remember using the encyclopedia much during college, and of course by late college and certainly by grad school, the encyclopedia was rapidly being eclipsed by the web. I mean, why bother with paper when you can just type a search term into Google?

Of course, the problem with Google is that it just finds what you're looking for. There's web surfing to be done from that starting point, but it's not the same as bouncing from encyclopedia entry to encyclopedia entry.

Wikipedia is highly hyperlinked, though, and very extensive. So you look up what you're looking for, read pages and pages about it, and then hop to any of dozens of tangentially-related entries. It's like old times again!

"Liberalism is about alleviating the inherent shortcomings of capitalism so that we can gain its benefits without having a society which totally blows." --Michael Feltes