Tag: wikipedia
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I think I'm probably done with my blog (and podcast) series of Wikpedia @ 25 posts. It's been a surprising amount of work.
But don't think I've stopped hitting Random Article! Today I was reading about surface plasmon resonance, and, despite looking at it on and off all day... I still don't think I "get" it. I've even dived into the linked articles to try to get a background understanding of the topics around it, but... nope. It's still all gibberish to me!
Think I need the ELI5 version!
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Wikipedia @ 25: Carl Person
As I continue my 25-consecutive-days-of-Wikipedia, today's random article of the day was Carl Person, a lawyer with an interesting history.
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Wikipedia @ 25: Cirrothauma Murrayi
Today, Wikipedia introduced me to a mysterious deep-dwelling octopus. So cool!
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Wikipedia @ 25: Milices Patriotiques
My random Wikipedia article of the day was Milices Patriotiques, who were a 22,000-strong communist group and part of the Belgian resistance in the Second World War. Which sounded really interesting, but their article was tragically short so that's pretty much all I have to say about them!
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Wikipedia @ 25: Jim Marshall
Today's random Wikipedia article was Jim Marshall (photographer). I enjoyed reading about him and even looked up some of the many photographs that he took of musicians in the 60s and 70s, but decided that because I was literally just writing about a photographer that I learned-about on Wikipedia, it probably wasn't the time to write about another!
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Wikipedia @ 25: Yousuf Karsh
Wikipedia is 25 years old this year, and in celebration of that I found my way via a Mercurial crater to the article about Yousuf Karsh, one of the most-important portrait photographers of the 20th century.
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Wikipedia @ 25: Necker Island
Today, thanks to Wikipedia, I learned a lot about a miniscule Hawaiian island with an interesting cultural and archaeological history... after I found my way there from a random page about a hip hop album!
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Wikipedia @ 25: Lake Baikal
Today's random Wikipedia article was about a kind of seal that lives only in Lake Baikal in Siberia, which turns out to be a really, really big lake. Like: it's got about a fifth of the world's fresh water in it; that's how big it is!
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Wikipedia @ 25: The Bugler of Algiers
Today's random Wikipedia article, which didn't make it into a full blog post or podcast episode like a few earlier ones did, was The Bugler of Algiers. This 1916 silent film, based on a novel called We Are The French, has no surviving copies and it's no longer even known what role some of the billed cast played in it! Among others, it starred Kingsley Benedict, who would later go on to feature in Fast and Furious! No... not that one... the 1927 silent comedy (which you can watch on YouTube... it's... about three times as long as it needs to be, IMHO).
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Wikipedia @ 25: Yo-Yo
This year is Wikipedia's 25th birthday, and as part of the celebrations I learned who Marcus Koh is... but that wasn't remotely as interesting as learning about the long history of the yo-yo!
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Wikipedia @ 25: Presto Card
The Presto Card is Toronto and the surrounding area's equivalent of London's Oyster Card. I enjoyed learning about it, but I don't think it justifies a whole blog post of what-I-learned.
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Wikipedia @ 25: Rail transport in Indonesia
Wikipedia is celebrating its 25th birthday, and today I'm celebrating by discovering what the Argo Wilis is, along with a dive into a rabbithole about rail transport in Indonesia!
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Wikipedia @ 25: Wesley Merritt
Wikipedia is celebrating its 25th birthday, and somehow as a result I ended up reading about Wesley Merritt, who was the shortest-lived Governor-General of the Philippines!
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Humans invented Wikipedia, which made accessing information highly-convenient, at the risk of questions about its authenticity1.
Then humans invented GPTs, which made accessing information even more-convenient2 at the expense of introducing hallucinations that can be even harder to verify and check.
Is humanity's long-term plan to invent something that spews complete nonsense that's simultaneously impossible to conclusively deny?3
Alt
Shonky MSPaint-grade graph showing ease of access increasing as ease of verification decreases, with a trend line going through Wikipedia (2001) through ChatGPT (2022) to an unknown future in 2043.
Footnotes
1 I'm well aware that in many subject areas Wikipedia routinely outranks many other sources for accuracy. But the point remains, because you've no idea what the bias of
randomuser123is; even if you check the sources they cite, you don't know what sources they omitted to include. I love Wikipedia, but I can't deny its weaknesses.2 Sure, ChatGPT and friends aren't always more-convenient. But if you need to summarise information from several sources, you might find them a more-suitable tool than those which came before. Why do I feel the need to add so many footnotes to what should have been a throwaway comment?
3 Actually, now I think about it, I'm confident that I can name some politicians who are ahead of the machines, for now.
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Get Lost on the Web
Dan looks at phallic buildings, researches baby monitors, and gets nostalgic for the diverse Web of yesteryear.