Wikipedia

You all knew it was coming, so I might as well get it over with. This rant will sorta flip-flop between supporting Wikipedia and throwing mud at them. Either way, it should be quite entertaining for the readers.

First off, I support what Wikipedia is doing. I think the concept is amazing. It's a knowledgebase of everything, created by everyone, editable (and thereby improvable) by anyone. It reminds me of Linux and the open-source community. Someone comes along and creates a great piece of software/information, then the users get to make improvements to it without any bias from the author as to its efficiency or otherwise. This means that the data goes through countless, and I mean COUNTLESS, filters, each one improving what the original and the previous patch failed to fix. In the words of the almighty computer god Linus Torvalds, "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", meaning peer review does in fact serve its purpose. As such, I wish all the teachers and others who call Wikipedia articles "incredible" (in the bad sense of the word) would learn what peer review really means. You know what I think? Well, of course you do, but...they need to admit the only reason they don't want us using Wikipedia for research is because it makes finding information on exactly what you want easy and fast! That's right, boys and girls! Using Wikipedia is a great alternative to using Google.

Seriously, am I the only one who is tired of trying to write a research paper on Dill pickles, going to Google, typing in "Dill pickles", sifting through 70 pages of crap, finally finding a link that looks good, clicking it, and being taken to a Scandinavian porn site?! I hate the entire idea of researching topics. It's flawed, but Ill get to that in a different rant. The point is, if I'm doing research on the Internet, I don't want porn! Put it in a pop-up window, send it to my e-mail, call my phone during dinner time about it, whatever. Just keep it out of my way when there are thousands of dollars of tuition riding on my ability to find a site that tells me what I want to know.

OK, so as I promised, now it's time to tell you what Wikipedia is doing wrong. Simply put, they are Nazis. Each article is assigned a handful of Nazis who check the editing history of the article, and undo any changes you make to it. They are the only ones allowed to be right. If asked why they reverted your edit that took 15 minutes to type up and added needed information to it, they will tell you "citations needed" or some other stupid crap. I always find that excuse funny, because about 90% of the article lacks citations. Now, I hate the thought of citing (see above), but I believe in consistency. If you are going to require every word to have a citation, how about just make the article read "The (Bible, 1 A.D,)."

So, yes, Wikipedia has some retards with no lives that we need to destroy, but I think with some human ingenuity and exploding Star Wars collectibles, we can do it. As for the teachers, they will probably never acknowledge Wikipedia as credible and therefore must have their wages lowered so low that they won't even check for correct citation. Problem solved. See, America? You should've made ME president.