Monday, January 16, 2006
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is SO cool. I can't believe that I only stumbled upon it a few months ago. And that through a random websearch (I feel like I could type www.google.com in my sleep!) Wikipedia is SO cool!!Okay, now that there's no confusion about how I feel about Wikipedia, let me describe it to you. It's an online, free encyclopeida. It is created by user contributions. If you are an information junkie, like I am, even the front page of Wikipedia will fascinate you. Right now, as I type this, the front page has a picture and link to an article about the history of the Texas Rangers.
I have tried (successfully this time) to ignore the teasers on the front page to look at the structure of the site. There are many categories. You can type in a search string and come up with an article relating to your topic. For example, I just got home from seeing the movie Memoirs of a Geisha. So I am interested in the whole idea of what the Geisha culture is all about. So I typed "Geisha" in the Wikipedia search string. It took me to an article about Geisha, with links to the same article in other languages and links to more articles about Japanese culture. At the bottom of the page there are references, links to related articles within Wikipedia, and external related links.
I also looked at the categories within Wikipedia. It's so cool that it's not linear. Someone like me could get lost in here. I checked out the Wikipedia Photography category. There are dozens and dozens of sub-categories and articles contained within the Photography category. Yeah - there's lots of reading for Lou Ann to do within Wikipedia!
Finally, when you read an article in Wikipedia, many of the words are hotlinks. For example, if you read this article about Ansel Adams, you'll see links to mentioned places, names, dates, national parks, and so on. Yeah, talk about rabbit-trail land!!
So ... go, check out Wikipedia, but only if you have a lot of time to spare!! :-)
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