Wikiality

Out of all of the "new" tools at our disposal thanks to Web 2.0, I think Wikipedia is by far the most useful, legitimate, and socially significant. Youtube is great for entertainment, self-promotion, or a good laugh. Blogs are great for sharing opinions and thoughts with others. Facebook is great for some reason or another, I suppose, but Wikipedia is a site that I believe will be around long before the all the others fizzle out, if they do. Reading the articles about what Wikipedia is and is not shed a very interesting light on the online encyclopedia. Upon reading these articles, it dawned on me that Wikipedia is the cherry on top of the shit-sundae that is Web 2.0. The people who run the site do so in a professional and almost anal manner, and to me it seems as though they truly care about the content of their site, unlike myspace, facebook, and others. The fact that they are a non-profit company reiterates the idea that they are running this site because they care about it, not to sit back and count giant stacks of money made off stupid ads that no one looks at anyway. When I first started using Wikipedia, I used it for reasons similar to when I first used myspace. When I encountered a new band I wanted to find out more about, I would listen to their free content on myspace, and look up their bio on Wikipedia. While thats where my relationship with myspace ends, I have continued to use Wikipedia for other inquiries. For example, last year I was taking a sociology class, and in lieu of wading through the textbook for hours to find definitions of terms and theories for the midterm, I Wikipedia'ed each one, and got a very good grade on the exam. I'm not saying Wikipedia should replace textbooks (Wikipedia says this themselves), I do think Wikipedia is a good source for finding widely known information. I truly think everyone would be better off if they spent the amount of time they do creeping around on facebook looking up information on Wikipedia.