jjd323's blog

Wikipedia is awesome. You probably don’t realise quite how awesome it is, but trust me, it is more awesome than you think. It is also free. FREE, as in speech. You can do what you like with it. FREE.

I remember when my parents bought me a copy of Microsoft Encarta 96 (an early digital encylopedia). It was shit. The mindmaze game was tolerable for a few hours, I guess. Someone should make a wikipedia-based game . Wait, not quite, someone should make a good wikipedia-based game. Anyway, the point is – people sell turd like Encarta; other people give away something better like Wikipedia. This is a good thing.

Mindmaze was not a great game.

But who are these other people giving away free stuff? There are obviously people who deal with the infrastructure and service side of things, and some of them even get paid; they aren’t really who I’m talking about. The great people, the ones who really make it work – “they” are you.

Imagine submitting, on a whim, an article to Encyclopædia Britannica . Assuming that the article was of reasonable quality, you might get a polite letter rejecting your offer of assistance within a few weeks. Most likely you wouldn’t. In the unlikely circumstance that the submission was accepted, it might appear in print on the timescale of years from when it was first penned (by which time it is out of date).

Today I wrote an article on DeucesCracked on wikipedia . There it is. Already. Wikipedia is awesome. Go do your thing with it.