Monday, October 18, 2004
Wikipedia - the online, free encyclopaedia
Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf, your weekly window where web matters – I am your Cyberhost Steven Lang – taking you this mad Monday morning to one of the most interesting sites on the whole of the Internet.
An extravagant claim? You be the judge.
The online – free – yes you heard right – the online free encyclopedia known as WIKIPEDIA – can be found at wikipedia dot org – now I am not sure that my pronunciation is correct so let’s spell this one W.I.K.I.P.E.D.I.A – WIKIPEDIA and it is dot org O.R.G
The big surprise with wikipedia is that any internet user can contribute to the online encyclopedia – if you supply or modify an entry you don’t get paid – which is not so good – but you can use it as much as you like - which is very good since the quality of the entries is very high.
When you log onto the front page – there is a welcome message telling you that Wikipedia is a free content encyclopedia and that the English editorial staff are currently working on more than 37 thousand articles.
It has a section telling you how to edit articles yourself, and another section where you can – as they say “experiment in the sandbox” in other words practice submitting a real article.
One of the features of all the entries is that each one is linked to many others – in fact every single word in the text of the article that can be linked to another entry is linked.
So for example, let is say I want to find information about Entebbe, I type in the word “Entebbe” and zappo there is an interesting article about the city – and there are linked references to Lake Victoria, Uganda the country, the famous raid that took place some years ago - And it tells you that the name Entebbe means “seat” in the Luganda language.
All the information you get is in a context and it is very easy to extend the context.
Features that I like – built for a real “information-for-the-sake-of-trivia” junkie – is the random entry button. Press it and any article just pops up and you suddenly find you are reading about the back-stabbing English courts of the twelve hundreds or aboriginal art in Australia.
Another great feature – every single year in the past few millennia has its own entry. You want to find out what happened in the world in 1746? Bash in the number and you have a quick reference to the main events of that year.
Now as one would expect – the overwhelming majority of entries have an overwhelming Eurocentric or USA centric bias – no problem – let’s stop moaning about it. You can make your own entries on Wikipedia. Let’s fill it with information about our own country so that the people out there can find out about South African history, geography and culture.
And there you have it – wikipedia dot org – a must have site – but it is also a site that we South Africans must bring up to speed with information about our country.
Thank-you for listening and please, please tune in again next Monday for more Cybersurf.
An extravagant claim? You be the judge.
The online – free – yes you heard right – the online free encyclopedia known as WIKIPEDIA – can be found at wikipedia dot org – now I am not sure that my pronunciation is correct so let’s spell this one W.I.K.I.P.E.D.I.A – WIKIPEDIA and it is dot org O.R.G
The big surprise with wikipedia is that any internet user can contribute to the online encyclopedia – if you supply or modify an entry you don’t get paid – which is not so good – but you can use it as much as you like - which is very good since the quality of the entries is very high.
When you log onto the front page – there is a welcome message telling you that Wikipedia is a free content encyclopedia and that the English editorial staff are currently working on more than 37 thousand articles.
It has a section telling you how to edit articles yourself, and another section where you can – as they say “experiment in the sandbox” in other words practice submitting a real article.
One of the features of all the entries is that each one is linked to many others – in fact every single word in the text of the article that can be linked to another entry is linked.
So for example, let is say I want to find information about Entebbe, I type in the word “Entebbe” and zappo there is an interesting article about the city – and there are linked references to Lake Victoria, Uganda the country, the famous raid that took place some years ago - And it tells you that the name Entebbe means “seat” in the Luganda language.
All the information you get is in a context and it is very easy to extend the context.
Features that I like – built for a real “information-for-the-sake-of-trivia” junkie – is the random entry button. Press it and any article just pops up and you suddenly find you are reading about the back-stabbing English courts of the twelve hundreds or aboriginal art in Australia.
Another great feature – every single year in the past few millennia has its own entry. You want to find out what happened in the world in 1746? Bash in the number and you have a quick reference to the main events of that year.
Now as one would expect – the overwhelming majority of entries have an overwhelming Eurocentric or USA centric bias – no problem – let’s stop moaning about it. You can make your own entries on Wikipedia. Let’s fill it with information about our own country so that the people out there can find out about South African history, geography and culture.
And there you have it – wikipedia dot org – a must have site – but it is also a site that we South Africans must bring up to speed with information about our country.
Thank-you for listening and please, please tune in again next Monday for more Cybersurf.
