Wikipedia is out of bounds today, participating in a global protest against the proposed SOPA bill that threatens our civil rights. And yet, I’m not so sad seeing Wikipedia’s black page after each search query.
You see, centralized sources of information aren’t really a good thing. Free or not, Wikipedia has somehow become an authority on people’s online research; whether you type the URL in or after searching in Google, Wikipedia articles maintain top relevancy.
Even when they are inaccurate!
I grew up in a home that encouraged research; my father owned more than 5,000 books from philosophy to astronomy, but not a single standard, multi-volume encyclopaedia. The only thing close to that was probably Le Petit Larousse.
In the 70’s, the “dream” of a grade school student was exactly that abomination: the multi-volume encyclopaedia. It sounds anecdotal but it’s entirely true: when asked to compose an essay, a friend cut out images and text from this precious, 20-volume strong encyclopaedia, then pasted them with glue onto the school book he presented to the teacher. In 1978, that was probably a pioneer act of “cut and paste”.
For that matter, I would like to see Wikipedia stay down longer, be it in protest of SOPA or for some other reason. Students and others need to learn to do research, versus copy and pasting or plagiarism.
And never trust a single point of authority or one day it might go down along with your trust and dreams.
Check out the Twitter feed for funny comments from students. Wikipedia is still accessible via mobile phones.
Gnanes – Apparently you can hit the ESC key while any search result is loading.