I use wikipedia all the time, professionally and recreationally. It's great. Of course, I've never needed to rat fuck a Canadian politician.
Obviously, kids doing learn to cite the sources wikipedia cites.
While it's not perfect, it is pretty amazing how well wikipedia works, given all the ways a project like that could go wrong.
The important thing is that people who aren't really notable enough to have their own entries don't have them.
In the pre-internet era, I inherited a 1935 Britannica, which was really terrific on WWI, late colonialism, the science of the time, and everything else thought then to be important. I think Trotsky wrote the entry on Lenin. GB Shaw wrote the entry on socialism. But the size of the thing was definitely a constraint, so as every field evolved, obviously entries have to be shortened or dropped in the coming editions. The world's going to hell in a handbasket, but bread, beer, and encyclopedias have improved so much in my lifetime it's hard to say it isn't all worth it.
Anyway, I read Wikipedia daily and learn a great deal. For example, I learned that Dutch officials can cause a scandal by falsely denying public assistance to citizens, which is pretty much foreign to me.
2: Yes, but so often the sources are hyperlinks that don't work anymore.
So, I guess then the next lesson is teaching kids how to use the Wayback Machine.
I also learned that Osian Ellis was the most famous musician to die recently.
7: You learned that on Wikipedia? I learned that on Twitter.
Wikipedia is fine for what it is. It's likely going to have the facts right, and it contains links to more reliable sources, and sometimes it's just flatout plagiarizing the reliable sources. I think we do kids a disservice because this generation gets basic facts by Googling things, and they're probably better informed than my generation was.
In my philosophy of tech class, I do an exercise where I ask the students to find the best local ski resort for beginners without using the Internet, and report how they did it. It's a ton of fun, as there's always one or two who completely lose their minds and do things like drive to Grandma's house to get the phone book and... it's something that wouldn't have been an interesting exercise just a decade ago.
When I was in K-12, I remember teachers saying "Don't quote or cite an encyclopedia." So nothing ever changes.
Maybe it's just how Google tailors its algorithms, but searches I do often don't show Wikipedia until the bottom of the page. Also, Google, as I'm sure you've noticed, has taken up highlighting a result and putting it first (the body is usually much further down, for some reason). Google's highlighted choices are usually much less useful than Wikipedia.
In my philosophy of tech class, I do an exercise where I ask the students to find the best local ski resort for beginners without using the Internet, and report how they did it. It's a ton of fun, as there's always one or two who completely lose their minds and do things like drive to Grandma's house to get the phone book and... it's something that wouldn't have been an interesting exercise just a decade ago.
This is fantastic.
It's like the Simpson's episode where Homer gets drunk and crashes his car into Marge's car. He needs to explain why he was out that late to the insurance agent without mentioning he was at Moe's, so he says that he was at the pornography store.
there's always one or two who completely lose their minds and do things like drive to Grandma's house to get the phone book
I'm curious how this qualifies as "completely losing their minds". Without the internet, the phone book seems like a pretty logical fallback. Is it the "drive to grandma's" part?
The answer, of course, is that three decades ago you just didn't optimize such a thing until you'd lived there and skied for long enough to have complex ideas of how novices learn to ski and why certain resorts aren't very helpful. The best you'd do as a novice is ask someone else's opinion and get a hopefully-not-crap answer. Then you'd fall down a lot.
It's like the Simpson's episode where Homer gets drunk and crashes his car into Marge's car.
My mom once backed out of our driveway, and as she was passing my dad's car, she managed to snag her bumper on his, and the net result somehow is that the bumpers became linked - one threaded somehow through the other, sort of - such that any motion made it worse. Like she must have been driving the path of a sewing machine needle somehow?
I never actually saw a picture, but it was explained to me that way. My dad likes to exaggerate to make a good story, though.
I hope the story he told to the insurance agent was better than Homer's.
16: It's.. drive to Grandma to get the phone book to get the phone number for the ski resort instead of calling Grandma.
17: Exactly -- you'd ask your colleague or friends who are avid skiers where to go, and they'd tell you what they thought, and it's not clear that you'd be better or worse informed.
I'm sometimes struck by the fact that I grew up in a world where a question like "What's the name of the actor who played the bad guy in that movie?" couldn't be answered easily and instantly, and I've almost forgotten what that was like.
There's a certain species of "trivia savant" that was rendered completely obsolete by the internet.
The real victims were people who come make up answers and sound authoritative regardless of actual knowledge.
I would call a ski rental shop or other experts who are informed but don't have a financial interest in which place you go skiing.
Years ago Google stopped working for "expert" searches and focusing on natural language. It used to be that if you wanted specific phrases and not others and knew how to properly format the key words you could quickly find very relevant things. Now they actively discourage that, telling you to phrase searches as a question, returning results that don't have a phrase you want even if you put it in quotes. I'm not sure why they can't accommodate both.
People sometimes expect me to know stuff off the top of my head because I'm an expert in whatever. But, though I do know stuff, most things I don't know even in what I'm an expert in. I just know where the answer is and what the right answer will be when I see it. The details are for google. Nobody is going to test me on the formula and even when I know it, I'm going to look it up just to be sure.
There's a certain species of "trivia savant" that was rendered completely obsolete by the internet
Nobody liked those people anyway.
(One time I was in a convenience store and the sing "Drift Away" was playing. The two clerks behind the counter were arguing and suddenly one asked me, "Hey, who does this song?" "Dobie Gray," I replied immediately and confidently. He turned and looked at the other clerk and cackled as they shot me a look of pure hatred.)
"(Or possibly a MAGA teacher who doesn't want to tell students that their parents are NPR snowflakes.)"
Citation to this particular species of hesitancy ever occurring?
i gather wpedia's big flaw is its reflection of the priorities of its contributors - charming when it results in vast quantities of information being gathered and obsessively curated about extremely obscure subjects, noxious when it repeatedly results in, e.g., women being held to an absurdly different standard to qualify for entries.
charming when it results in vast quantities of information being gathered and obsessively curated about extremely obscure subjects
Early on in wikipedia's existence I recall seeing jokes about how finally the world had an authoritative source on the details of Star Fleet uniforms and the geography of Middle Earth.
26: How would you get their telephone number? Do you have a phone book? Would you call directory assistance? Drive to the ski shop? I had to get my parents a phone book about 8 years ago. It's harder than you would think.
If I don't have a phone book and can bill it to the class as an expense, directory assistance. Pre-internet I'd definitely have a yellow pages on hand though.
I used to think the sign of an entitled rich person was a guy who would spend $.50 calling directory assistance and pay the extra $1 to have them connect instead of writing the number down and calling it yourself.
30.last: That was already widely available.
32: You misspelled "repeating it under your breath while hanging up and redialing."
Before kids think we had mental superpowers, recall that you had to remember only seven digits back then, or four if I'm a small town.
And then we'd go look up things in the 1972 edition of World Book.
32: I had one pre-internet too, but getting one post internet is no easy thing. My mother is kind of entitled but also super disorganized. It was in vain that I tried to get her to keep an address book or use the phone book. We even turned off directory assistance, but she would always get it added back on again.
In that slim slice of time when there was internet but not Wikipedia, and people had cell phones but not smart phones, we would call the MIT crisis hotline, DEF TUV TUV OPER OPER, with our questions. I don't know if they had useful advice on slopes for novice skiers, but I remember being stoned at a party and trying to remember the name of the Childlike Empress in Neverending Story. MIT crisis hotline came through.
Nightline! I was in charge of layout for the paper and we often had dead space to fill that we would donate to PSAs. We had some from national agencies but if we didn't have any good ones to paste in (in those days, literally paste onto layout boards with wax) we'd come up with new ways of advertising Nightline.
35: When were you a small town? Did you grow up to be a micropolitan statistical area?
Stick with the Red Car and keep out Cloverleaf Industries!
Someday I'll tell my granddaughter (now 4!) about the summer I worked delivering phonebooks, and she'll think I'm just making stuff up.
IASIMHB that I delivered every phone book in Manhattan.
Yes, people should stop tut-tutting at Wikipedia and start yelling at Google, as per 26. Every year it gets harder to get an answer to the question you're asking, as opposed to the question that they think most people should ask using some of the same words.
Yes, but it's still basically magic.
40: Is that the genesis of "Mr. Peterson can't call Nightline. She's a cat."?
29 is very true. Wikimedia says it's working on that, IDK if they're making progress.
Nth complaints about Google.
Conversely, my biggest complaint about Wikipedia is that its own search function tolerates no fuzziness at all.
What bugged me when lecturers pissed on Wikipedia was that, they, the experts, could, y'know, just go edit it until wasn't shit? Seeing as how underworked they are.
Interesting bit on editing various Chinese wiki-alikes.
The biggest problem with google is the stupid phone.
A funny "how could anyone have done this before the internet" example that occurred to me last year was "How did people used to find the ferry schedules (not to mention book the tickets) to Scottish islands before their vacation?" (I'm not sure what the right combination of the following options is: their travel agent called someone, they had to wait until they got to the ferry terminal to book, or just that foreigners didn't take vacations to Scottish islands.
Maybe Thomas Cook did more than trains!
Stupid phone. That was punctuated incorrectly.
My father, a retired academic, has taken to editing (not-english) wikipedia as a hobby. He picks a topic, borrows books from the library, does his research, and then edits the articles with references. I find it rather charming. He started because he noticed the pages for his area of expertise were weak, but now it's expanding into just picking a topic for the week.
re: 52
And you'd probably be able to find the appropriate printed schedule in leaflet form at most train stations, even fairly small local ones. The counter staff at those train stations could also have told you.
Citation to this particular species of hesitancy ever occurring?
Found out last night that Pokey's teacher is MAGA, via gossip with a friend who works at the school. But she hasn't done anything that has tripped enough of a trigger for Pokey to tip us off, at least?
However, we did have a sketchy conversation with Pokey about two of his specials teachers. The art teacher emailed a thing to the library teacher, who chuckled, and showed it to Pokey and one other kid who were standing right there.
Pokey's explanation is that it was some sort of video with a set up that you think you're looking at Hitler, but then when the details or color is added, it turns out you're looking at MLK. We launched into a very buzzkill lecture about how problematic this video likely was. Pokey slumped lower and lower in his chair and regretted telling us about it.
(I get that - from his POV he got this special adult privilege and it was unexpected and funny, and now we're telling him the whole thing was bad and wrong. Womp-womp. Even addressing this point head on doesn't erase the buzzkill nature of the conversation.)
Also I just now remembered that my mom has been hounding me to correct my grandmother's wikipedia entry. I'm sure it's not hard to do, but it's the type of task that's unknown enough that I keep shelving it.
You should add something to punch up what is largely (an impressive) academic career. Maybe a minor roll in a Batman movie or something.
Is this the "be kind" one, or another one?
58 Editing wp entries is so easy even I can do it.
video with a set up that you think you're looking at Hitler, but then when the details or color is added, it turns out you're looking at MLK
I'm sorry, what? How are these people still employed?
For the same reason the Red Cruz is.
49- I think that was a joke based on a syndicated comic we ran that a lot of people hated. It's possible we took the joke someone else made and did run it as a free ad.
I have no idea what you're talking about.
Call 38800 and ask them to explain it to you.
56: Right, but you couldn't do that from the US. So one approach is that once you get there you get all those leaflets and then make your plans, which means you need to really plan in extra time to sort that kind of thing out and do adapt if say you learn after arriving that a particular ferry doesn't run on Sundays. But I guess your point is you could probably do that all at once early on in the trip, and not have to actually go to the individual ferry terminals?
You could certainly get a U.K. railroad timetable in the U.S. without too much trouble at an American university in 1991. I don't see why a ferry schedule would be much harder.
59. You could add cross references to her and her children's pages. Neither mentions the other.
71: From the library at the university you mean? (Sorry for being dumb, I only once planned a vacation before everything was on the internet, in 2001. And even then I think I found the train schedules and purchased my rail pass on the internet, even though hotel booking was all through travel guides and phone calls. I literally don't know how this kind of thing worked.)
There was a whole section in the book store -- there used to be stores where they sold books, in hard copy -- for travel guides. The guide for Scottish islands might not have had the schedule for that summer, but they would have said something like 'the ferry usually runs 3 times a week,' and would have had the phone number for the ferry operator. And, you know, part of the adventure of foreign travel was figuring out stuff like that on the fly.
In 1985, we spent a couple of weeks driving around Italy in a VW bug with no working starter -- had to park intelligently to get a running start -- and while I suppose we spent a bit more time on logistics (we never had a place to stay before 4 or 5 pm on the day) it was all pretty doable.
Luckily, Italy is very hilly and used to very liberal interpretations of parking regulations.
I think 74 captures part of it. You didn't plan ahead that much -- you just did it. I would show up in cities in new countries with just a travel guide with no plan, and I would just walk into a hotel mentioned by the travel guide, or even just one on the way, or one near the train station or something. Now I would never show up in a city without a hotel room booked. A couple of years ago I had a trip where I forgot to book a hotel, and I booked one in a panic at the airport when I landed.
It was a different time. For example, if we committed a crime by breaking into a building we were supposed to be in, we didn't publicly announce it to all of our friends and all of their friends.
Also, we used to light cigarettes pretty much without restriction.
It's amazing how accustomed we were to nothing being optimized. OTOH I can't get myself very worked up about everything being optimized, either. Surely there's a sweet spot of the right number of things to be optimized. I suppose if you wanted to take the derivative and go through the calculus of it all, you could create optimus prime.
There was a travel guide store on Farragut Square in Washington DC back in the day. They sell frozen yogurt there now.
Farragut Square deserves a lingerie store called "Damn, Those Torpedoes."
79. I miss that place. It clised maybe 12 years ago. Great set of maps. Better than the availability in Borders Books.
I'm pretty sure that AAA still puts out travel guides. I'm sure there's more to this that just putting the text of the guide online and adding a 'book now' button, but it's not immediately obvious what that would be.
I might lose my BoomerCard over this, but we didn't actually have to walk nine miles through the snow, uphill each way, to get to school every day.
It's also worth pointing out that I can remember more than one evening of driving from hotel to hotel until desperation forced us to sleep in the one with original, 1950s pee stains on the carpets.
Re: optimization, we had a silly over-optimized situation today. We decided to buy a new dishwasher. All the online reviews say Brand A is the best. AJ and I look up where you can buy it. There's a nice locally owned store, perfect. We show up at the store, and despite listings on both Brand A and the store's website, they no longer sell brand A. We look online on our phones and find Brand A at a big box store. We go to that store. It's backordered until May. We shrug at each other. Should we wait until May?
I realized that the most sensible thing to do was probably to go to a store, look at the actual dishwashers, pick one we like, and buy it. Like you would have if you weren't super into going to the library to read Consumer Reports.
Pick the quiet kind, unless you have a big house where you can't hear it from the living room.
My favorite travel book (specific area version) was The Alaska Milepost. Extremely detailed and useful. I recall descriptions of the location frost heaves on some of the the roads.
I also used to travel with both the Sterns' Roadfood and Amazing America (roadside attractions). Family vacations in the 60s AAA guidebooks were the bible.
The thing that sort of amazes me was how did we meet up with folks at national parks etc. Or flight delays and all that crap. It was less efficient and flexible.
There's was a lot more time sitting in a car/airport/mall/etc. thinking "where the fuck is he?".
86: boy do I regret not asking you for that advice about six years ago.
Our dishwasher is probably twenty feet from the couch, so it really does make a difference.
Anyway, with a family of six and a dishwasher that old, it's probably going to need replaced soon.
Oh wait, I was thinking washing machine. Our washing machine is stupid noisy.
Probably shouldn't run the dishes and silverware through it.
I just cashed a check using my phone app without any assistance from The Missus -- for the very first time. I am very modern.
Oh man, that has been one of the biggest conveniences of a phone for me. It's huge. Depositing checks was one of those tasks that I would never do and eventually lose the check.
95-97. I'm afraid to do that and don't have the bank app on my phone. A friend of mine once had his Bank of America account hacked and large sums were moved out - like $15k one day and $10k on day 3 even though he reported it on day 1. He is a social worker and super skilled at being calm, but he nearly lost his shit and hard to talk through with the woman how stressed he was.
He had a smartphone and was at that point the only person I knew who used the banking app. Correlation is not causation, but ai'm still too afraid to use the banking app over the phone. I do log in on the web with lots of passwords and token confirmation. I think we switched that to a text message, so it's just superstition at this point.
Our dishwasher was making screeching noises that you could hear in every other room because the plumbing (including radiator pipes) carried the noise around the house. It always stopped eventually and I didn't want a repair guy coming in the house so I ignored it for a while. It turns out crap in the water line had built up and was blocking the water shutoff valve for most of the cycle every time we ran it. Fortunately the dishwasher drains excess water instead of overflowing if water keeps coming in. Unfortunately the way I learned what the problem was was when our water bill for Oct-Dec was a thousand fucking dollars. $25 part and half an hour and I fixed it. Which, incidentally, I never would have known how to do in the days before internet DIY repair videos.
I shouldn't exaggerate, we share water with the other unit in our building so our share was only $600, or $200 a month. I guess we kind of screwed the other owners.
Our water bill used to be very small, then somebody noticed we were dumping untreated shit into the river and had lead on the water.