Fooled by Wikipedia

So, I'm feeling a little foolish right now because right after Sarah Palin's nomination was announced, I went to her Wikipedia page. I read it, and a few of the talk pages, and I noted that at soon as the nomination had been announced the Wikipedia troops had formed ranks and seemed to be protecting the page from bad editing.

I went away thinking that she didn't seem tooo horrible, as far as republicans go, and that I would probably hate the rhetorical and symbolic role she would play in this campaign more than her as a person. (This is close to the version I read.)

My feelings toward Palin are noticibly more extreme these days. And it looks like this period of wikipedia-induced calm was no accident, since someone who may have been a part of the campaign was cleaning up her page to make her look like an Alaskan mover and shaker, rooting out corruption and protecting the environment (which probably is pretty appealing to most people who would check wikipedia in those first hours). [via Derivative Work]


Of course, the current Palin wikipedia page is much much more useful, and through the use of RSS feeds, blogs, online news sources, and word of mouth I and many other people have gotten more info on the governor of Alaska than we thought we would ever want in the last few weeks.

So, yes, Wikipedia was misleading, it let me down in that one second, but this also drove home for me that these days the "authority" of a single source is much less important to me than the general practice of keeping your eye on lots of kinds of information, and knowing how they all fit together, who is writing what, and why. If that Wikipedia page had been the last thing I ever read about Palin before deleting all my RSS feeds, and saying goodbye to the internet, then yes, I would have been Misinformed, capital M, and it could have been avoided had I consulted a more authoritative source. But that's not how most of us process information these days, and so, tragedy averted.

In other news I've been a horrible procrastinator this week, downloading pretty Firefox extensions to kill time (this is sort of like buying lots of brightly colored school supplies in the fall when you know, that really, you are just going to have to do your work and the post it notes are not going to change that.)

But, if anyone else wants to procrastinate too, this turns the age old practice of gmailing yourself to-do items into a manageable and useful practice, and the google notebook extension, available here will mean you never have to write anything down again, and is good for taking notes to panopto or clipping phrases (it attaches a url automatically) that might be the answer to your search and seize questions, but probably aren't.

E-reader lust

This one is pretty cool looking...

If you can get past the slick video of the rollable! screen you see that there is no announcement yet what e-reader software it will be bundled with. The device is wireless enabled but doesn't seem to have a browser. Content can be directly downloaded through the clunkily named Content World website (which sounds like the geekiest publishing/libraries amusement park ever).

Anyway, its pretty, but I don't think I could bring myself to buy one of these that couldn't read epub files. Not that I can afford one anyway.... but they will get cheaper quickly I hope.

When the sun's over the yard arm...

It has been forever since I last posted, but here I am! Reference class has proven to be trickier than imagined, but I am looking forward to the ready reference assignment because I am very over bibliographies.

A request from my uncle and dad last time I was home, was to find the origin of the phrase "the sun's over the yard arm" to denote the time of the day to have your first cocktail.

Uncle Marc, you were right about the yard arm, but its not dock workers but tipsy ships officers, and it actually happens at 11 in the morning.

This was one of those excellent moments where you google something and the first result is a good answer to your question that is cited from an authoritative source.

The beauty of online reference interactions (on message boards and public answer services) is that google can find them for the next person who wants to know the same thing, which isn't true of in-person reference.