Imagine life without Wikipedia

I was thinking about this the other night. This fall will mark ten years since I was a freshman in college. I can’t imagine what it would be like to enter the University of Iowa with the amount of tools that I have at my disposal now. RSS feeds are one thing, and it puts the mandatory subscriptions to newspapers to shame. If you think paying for college is expensive, try being a poor college student and having to shovel out cash for a one year subscription to the New York Times that you’ll only need for about four months.

Then there is Wikipedia. Google is one thing, but a laptop and campus wide Wi-Fi would make life completely insane. Look at the coming iPhone and what that would be like. The Internet is at our fingertips now. Literally!

There I would be, sitting in my introduction to neuroscience[wiki] courses, wondering what I might be able to find about synapses[wiki] that the professor is talking about. I’ll spare you the boredom from there, but that entry sent me on a trip to memory lane about a lot of subjects that I studied back in the day. IPSP’s[wiki], EPSP’s[wiki], protozoa[wiki]…

A recent article in the Guardian speaks about the rise in popularity of Wikipedia and how it seems to be outranking Google. I can’t say that is too far off the mark. I use the two in tandem. If I’m not searching directly on Wikipedia, I’m searching Google for the entry on Wikipedia that I want.

I recall my high school days when the Internet was “installed” in the library. A lot of my teachers disliked the idea of students doing research there. It was ok if we parsed other libraries, online, for information, mainly to find other publications. Taking something we found and applying it to whatever we were assigned to complete through research? They made us cite it in the bibliography with a method that was intended to be excruciating so we’d think twice before finding a website for research about something like “polyvinyl chloride”.

Side note, polyvinyl chloride is the full name of PVC. PVC is a type of plastic. While doing research in the same library that I’ve already mentioned, I also discovered that PVC is a common material used in S&M and fetish costumes. Needless to say, that raised some eyebrows of my instructors. A piece of information that has stuck with me to this day, all because of a trip to my local library. Who knew? Buy hey! There’s a wiki for it!

Wikipedia is handy and an everyday tool for me. Still, I’m a little lost on something. I’ve thought about starting an entry for various things, mainly the podcasts that I’m doing. Is that the correct thing to do, or should one wait for someone else to start a wiki for them? I might go ahead and do it anyway. If that makes me come off as selfish, then so be it.