Wikipedia

So I was perusing the newsblog over at Baseball Think Factory when I came across this article about a baseball player who intentionally wrote a false entry about himself on Wikipedia.

"If Holdzkom does have a musical past, he won’t admit it, except to say that he and his brother, John, cooked up an elaborate story and posted it on the online encyclopedia site Wikipedia — a site that can be edited by the public.

“It’s not true,” Holdzkom said of his child prodigy story. “We just make things up, and Wikipedia puts it on there. I’ve never been on Johnny Carson. It just sounded good.”

Well, what an a**.  To me, that's no better than painting graffiti on a stranger's wall.

I've only recently become a fan of Wikipedia, but in that short amount of time I've come to adore the site.

Sure, a publicly edited encyclopedia has it's flaws: there's no guarantee the info is correct and there's always the idiot factor (case in point: Ed Gein's entire page disappeared yesterday. It was there at 9 am and gone by 10 that night, with only an offensive sentence left in its wake.)  I've also lost track of how many Digimon and animie entries there are (gag).

But it harkens back to my geeky youth, where I'd joyfully pass time reading random entries in a Children's Encyclopedia we owned. (and boy do I remember my joy when my Dad won a complete set of the adult version!)

So I sit and randomly sift through the site. The wife rents Marie Antoinette? Well, let's look her up. From there, I open multiple windows for different terms and people mentioned in the article, from the Revolution to the guillotine to the Bourbon lineage.

 After that, I might just become curious about the cast of the movie and look up Kirsten Dunst. That inspires me to look up Spiderman, which takes me to Marvel, where I look up Stan Lee, who in turn brings me to Kevin Smith . .

And on and on.

It's obnoxious really. My wife's taken to watching TV with me and saying, whenever some fact presents itself,  "Uh oh, better hurry and look that up on Wikipedia"

And I do.

Tags: Wikipedia, Baseball Think Factory