Welcome to My World

Wikipedia is not without its critics, and undoubtedly I’m about to give them another reason to hate it. I land somewhere in the middle with respect to Wikipedia — it doesn’t (yet) have the clout and reliability that a publication like Encyclopedia Britannica might, but it most certainly beats those publications hands-down in timeliness, in sheer size, and in ease of access (I can’t carry those hardbound tomes around with me anywhere I go, but I can cram the text-only version of Wikipedia onto a 2GB SD card and read it on my smartphone). I don’t trust it completely, but I also don’t instantly doubt everything I see there. I figure it’s suitable as a starting point for research, so long as you’re actually willing to check all those citations.

Yet another reason to be thoroughly amused by Wikipedia is that there is an entry solely devoted to the concept of the cameltoe. Do not click that link if you are at work or are anywhere that might cause you grief for looking at, well, labia covered but cleaved by clothing, because this discussion of the phenomenon of tight, skimpy clothing showing off the goods betwixt the legs of the fairer sex most definitely includes pictures for example purposes.

The funny thing is this article is not marked for deletion, requiring cleanups, in need of additional citations, or really any other complaints of any sort. There is a single “verification needed,” which indicates nobody’s been able to actually dig up the book mentioned in the citation and verify that it says what the article claims it does. Otherwise, though, this article represents a rather well-done, if not somewhat obscure, entry for Wikipedia — it cites sources, it includes examples, it briefly (and concisely) defines what the term actually means, explains where it is used, distinguishes between this concept and the concept of “uncleft bulges,” offers references from popular media, and even explains the common causes of the apparently beloved (by men, anyway ) phenomenon.

I am still laughing. I just saw a photograph of a woman’s pelvic region, in relatively high resolution, cropped to accentuate her cameltoe, on a publicly-available reference site, used in the context of explaining academically what exactly a “cameltoe” is. I’ll agree that, in general, it’s a nice thing to see, btw I just never thought I’d see it in a friggin’ encyclopedia