Most of you will know my opinion of Wikipedia. I think it is a misunderstood work-in-progress that has many problems and at times very awkward methods of solving them; I am also not sure I like the idea of everybody being able to write articles on nuclear physics, because that is what nuclear physicists should be doing.
Nevertheless, it is a great source of information, and it would be stupid not to use it, if you know how to read between lines and how to judge the grade of reliability of an article. And so, much time is wasted informing yourself and educating yourself on many important subjects.
And we all know what that means: We click any link that sounds interesting and in the end, we end up knowing that the Doomsday Clock has made an appearance in an episode of the Gummi Bears. And sometimes, we find articles where we honestly think "what the hell were they thinking?" And with that I mean, the author(s) who wrote the article: What in the world made him/her/them think this is of important encyclopaedic value? Is this important knowledge that needs to be stored?
Sometimes, you read an article that just barely seems to have something to say, and you think that it contains relevant information, and yet in the last moment it hits the iceberg nevertheless, and you come out with another piece of completely useless and irrelevant knowledge. Sometimes articles just have odd titles that catch your interest; and in the end you just wonder what situation in your life would require this kind of knowledge. A classic of this type is the Heavy Metal Umlaut, an article that catches your interest as a metalhead, and you read it thinking "oh, so that's why", until you have read it, try to regather what it told you and figure that nothing in this article was of any intellectual value.
So come and post your favourite Wikipedia links for the world to see and marvel at the unlimited masses of totally useless knowledge!
I will post more as I remember and/or find them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:F ... l_amputees
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaid_problem
Nevertheless, it is a great source of information, and it would be stupid not to use it, if you know how to read between lines and how to judge the grade of reliability of an article. And so, much time is wasted informing yourself and educating yourself on many important subjects.
And we all know what that means: We click any link that sounds interesting and in the end, we end up knowing that the Doomsday Clock has made an appearance in an episode of the Gummi Bears. And sometimes, we find articles where we honestly think "what the hell were they thinking?" And with that I mean, the author(s) who wrote the article: What in the world made him/her/them think this is of important encyclopaedic value? Is this important knowledge that needs to be stored?
Sometimes, you read an article that just barely seems to have something to say, and you think that it contains relevant information, and yet in the last moment it hits the iceberg nevertheless, and you come out with another piece of completely useless and irrelevant knowledge. Sometimes articles just have odd titles that catch your interest; and in the end you just wonder what situation in your life would require this kind of knowledge. A classic of this type is the Heavy Metal Umlaut, an article that catches your interest as a metalhead, and you read it thinking "oh, so that's why", until you have read it, try to regather what it told you and figure that nothing in this article was of any intellectual value.
So come and post your favourite Wikipedia links for the world to see and marvel at the unlimited masses of totally useless knowledge!
I will post more as I remember and/or find them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:F ... l_amputees
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornocracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mermaid_problem
