Refleksi Minda

I’ve got a new surfing hobby; perusing through Wikipedia. At the risk of sounding like a big dork, I’m going to loudly proclaim that I truly enjoy surfing Wikipedia, the ‘Free Encyclopedia’.

For those of you living under a rock in the furthest corner of God’s green earth and have no idea what Wikipedia is, I urge to click on this. Yup, it’s a Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia! How cool is that?!

But seriously, Wikipedia is probably the single most informative ‘website’ on the net. Before this, when we want to look for information on the net, we would have to enter the search term on a search engine (or in modern day terms, ‘Google it’), press enter, and we would be presented with a list of sites that correspond to our search term. Great for looking for websites, but to actually look for information, it’s a downright chore.

Case in point: a few weeks ago, I had to prepare a case brief for my class. The brief had a statement from a witness, that said the person he saw had a ‘bob haircut’. Now I had a rough idea what a ‘bobcut’ is, but I wanted to be sure. So I Googled ‘bob cut’. A few thousand websites came back to me, from sites telling you what is the best haircut to get for your head shape, to websites talking about great celebrity bobcuts and even someone’s blog, his name was ‘Bob’ and his blog was basically ‘his cut’ (Bob’s Cut, geddit?). Of course, I eventually found out what a bobcut was, but if I had just gone to Wikipedia and type ‘bob cut’, I would instantly get a disambiguation site (a site that lists several articles relating to my search term, displayed in order of relevancy). I would just have to click on ‘Bob Cut’ article (with 100% relevancy) and viola! - "A bob cut is a haircut, usually for woman but sometimes for men, in which the hair is cut short, but weighted area is left to fall between the ears and chin’. Instant info.

It’s a vast source of information. The English language section on it’s own has 1, 160, 000 plus articles. It also has articles in other languages, French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Chinese and, lo and behold 10,000 + articles in Bahasa Melayu! Check this Malay language article. Cue proud Malay jingoism.

One can seriously lose oneself in Wikipedia. I once lost 3 hours of my life just surfing through it, jumping from one article to the other. A few interesting articles - click here for an Islamic view on Jesus, or here for an article on Malaysian English, here for an article on my favorite anime and lastly, click here for an article on my ‘favourite’ politician.

The main strengths of Wikipedia are probably its free content and more importantly, the fact that anyone can edit and add to the database. What this means is that, unlike most other encyclopedias, it covers even the most remote and unconventional topics, things such as anime series, obscure celebrities and even the least known cultural phenomenons can be found in its database. It also helps greatly that being online, all one needs to do is enter a term, without having to peruse through an index to find the relevant article.

Of course, like everything else, Wikipedia is not perfect. Some of the articles do not contain a lot of information (sometimes not having more than a few lines, Wikipedia terms these articles as ’stubs’). Not every single thing can be found on it, which is understandable. Also, its search engine can be very picky sometimes, a misplaced ‘e’ in your spelling may yield no results. More crucially, the fact that it can be edited by anyone means that sometimes, in matters where opinions divide, the objectivity of the articles may be of dispute (although the administrators have done an admirable job in flagging up these kind of articles).

Yet, despite its shortcomings, the wealth of information in its database cannot be denied. Ever since the internet was conceived, we’ve been told that the World Wide Web allows us to access information by the tip of our fingers. While technically true, it has always been the case that one has to plough through various websites before actually obtaining the information one needs. With the increased popularity (and use) of Wikipedia, the notion of ‘information at the click of a button’, at long last, rings true.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 31st, 2006 at 2:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.