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.

Call me naive or clueless but I’m genuinely curious why exactly I’m supposed to care that [insert random celebrity here] is pregnant? Why is this shit reported on supposed “news” sites, like Reddit or Digg?

The “news” that “Christina Aguilera is pregnant and naked for her latest magazine cover” scrolled through my Google Reader tonight, and naturally because I’m an idiot American I clicked the link to see what the fine folks over at Digg had to say about it (clicking the link in Reader takes you to the discussion page on Digg, not the actual article). Naturally by the time that page had loaded, there were complaints that the original site hosting the article in question (along with the all-important, entirely non-revealing “nude” pictures of some random celebrity) had croaked.