Friday, July 28, 2006

Wikipedia, Again

The Onion (America's Finest News Source) has a wonderful article entitled Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence, that expertly skewers the style, pretensions, and reliability of Wikipedia.

NEW YORK—Wikipedia, the online, reader-edited encyclopedia, honored the 750th anniversary of American independence on July 25 with a special featured section on its main page Tuesday.

"It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. "At 750 years, the U.S. is by far the world's oldest surviving democracy, and is certainly deserving of our recognition," Wales said. "According to our database, that's 212 years older than the Eiffel Tower, 347 years older than the earliest-known woolly-mammoth fossil, and a full 493 years older than the microwave oven."
"In fact," added Wales, "at three-quarters of a millennium, the USA has been around almost as long as technology." ...

But wait, there's more!

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2 Comments:

Comment by Blogger Jim Horning:

See also this thoughtful blog post about a New Yorker article about Wikipedia.

4:08 PM  
Comment by Blogger Jim Horning:

And this post by Doug Tygar (and following comments).

2:40 PM  

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