The Wikipedia

Numerous times in our journey together, I’ve linked to something called the Wikipedia.

I find the Wikipedia to be amazing source of information on all sorts of topics that typically wouldn’t be covered in any other form of standardized catalogue. What’s even more amazing is that all of the articles in it, of which there are 814,000+, are submitted by volunteers, and can be edited by anyone. This allows it to stay amazingly current on one hand [compared to a text encyclopedia], but at the same time allows people to edit the pages on controversial topics and insert the word “BOOBIES” at a random point (hey, I’m not making this up, it can happen.)

Given the fact that there is no real way to verfiy whether the information contained within is factual and without a heavy bias, the Wikipedia is not for looking up everything. Of course, there’s plenty of things that I’m not all that concerned about it being factually correct (i.e. it’s not a life or death issue.)

Today I will share some of the more entertaining Wikipedia articles I’ve read. I’ve already talked about some of these before:

-Pwn- the depth this article goes into on this bit of Internet slang is, well, breathtaking.

-Robocop- What’s sadder than the fact that someone typed in, revised, and formatted all that text on just the first Robocop movie, is the fact that I’ve read all of it, as well as all of the text about both sequels. And just for fun, here’s a picture of the legend:

-Calvinism- A broad overview of all things Calvinism. This is an example of where the Wikipedia is useful, but also needs to have its information verified elsewhere. It gives you plenty of info about the topic, but this topic is more serious than those above. Further studies into this topic led to the Theopedia, which led to the TULIPedia, which might be taking this whole “pedia” gig a leeeeeetle too far.

-Flying Spaghetti Monsterism- Mentioned previously re: Intelligent Design on this blog.

-Random article- Probably the coolest article of all on the Wikipedia. Does what it says it will, gives you a random topic. Without this feature, let’s face it, I would have never known what the Schönhage-Strassen algorithm was. (whew!)

In other news, today’s funny link is classic. Enjoy: The Credit Card Prank.