So I came to a conclusion the other week. I don't like Wikipedia. Infact, I would say it grinds my gears.
The idea of Wikipedia is great, infact I wish it was more of a living breathing website. Eating and digesting tons of data; organizing and categorizing all of its components. Making almost every subject built like a subject of text that you could expand upon. Search for Digital Sound Encoding and you could click on a cyber school that would take you to the basics of sound waves and keep clicking on subjects all the way to you completely understand Digital Encoding. Thats what it was going to be, but it has become something else.
At first it was the whole changing of biographies of politicians that proved how juvenile the internet is. I found this only mildly annoying, and even more funny. You could see the direction that Wikipedia was going. However, I was ok with this. Thats the greatness of having an open forum of opinion.
I use Wikipedia alot for research, its a great place to look if you just don't have a source of obscure knowledge. If I can't find something, I'm sure Wikipedia can point me in the right direction. It is a great source of direction.
What I hate is people who think its reference. People have told me about cool technology that is being worked on or a break through study, I ask, "where did you hear about that" They say, "I read it on Wikipedia". You might as well have told me that "Billy the dishwasher at my favorite greek restaurant who has a friend who works for NASA told me", because it honestly could be the same thing.
A lot of the stuff on Wikipedia is very intelligent and has reliable sources, but at the same time with a few clicks, it could become unreliable.
I nearly snapped the other day in a meeting when a coworker was to bring information about a possible alternate medium. He brought a stack of papers that I had to intergrate into our report. I was thouroughly impressed with the amount of research, when asked what site I could get this info he simply replied, "wikipedia". Are you fucking kidding me. You simply printed the wikipedia site for this subject? That's not research!
Wikipedia does state that "it is not a dictionary" "it is not an encyclopedia" and I truly agree with Wikipedia's stance. I just don't like the fact that people believe that this is a source of information. Its a wonderful forum to find obscure information and point you in the direction of information. It's not a reference of information, but a good start.
I maybe wrong, or maybe I just don't know how to word it.
