Information is power, sort of.

I’m slow when it comes to internet trends – I actively try to avoid them until they’re unavoidable, or have something tangible to offer me, just because there are too many of them. Keeping up with the Internet could actually be a full time job, and for someone who’s self employed like me, distractions are an occupational hazard I need to avoid.

Just witness the phenomena of blogging – I’m well into it, but it’s taken me several years to actually get involved. Even though this is a form of distraction, I find it quite useful, as it kick starts me into creativity mode in the morning. The mind is like a muscle, and if you don’t use it, it becomes soft and floppy. Blogging helps me start thinking, but I don’t blog when there’s nothing worth blogging about – because then it would really end up being a distraction and the benefit to me of doing it would start to be undermined.

The reason for this entry is that I’m feeling the love for wikipedia. This website/idea/concept is a seriously impressive piece of work, and not simply the latest fad on the e-block. For those who don’t know, wikipedia.com is a website which contains a searchable encyclopaedia in several languages. It currently contains 1,301,271 cross referenced articles in English and around 4.6 million overall in other languages about pretty much anything you can think of.

It’s in the top 20 most visited websites, and for a writer, it’s a fabulous resource, because it presents information on wildly diverse subjects, cross referenced and hot linked. You can jump from article to article and spend hours reading about wide ranging ideas, people and aspects of history. It’s an excellent research tool, it’s great for firing your imagination and also, it’s a great way to waste time and still feel like you’ve done something.

If you are looking for information on something and there isn’t yet an article about it, you can create one. If you are a subject matter expert and you come across a page that is not properly referenced, then you can edit it. I can see how in time, this could become one of the most significant repositories of human knowledge.

So, is this starting to sound familiar yet?

Wikipedia does what we were told the Internet would do when the world wide web started to become commonly available for access, around 10 to 15 years ago. The web was to be the grand liberating force, our generation’s contribution to the great work of mankind. Publishing for the people, the death of the printed word, the end of physical and socio-economic boundaries.

Of course, over time, the web has become less and less useful, not more, as the lack of any kind of quality control mechanism or editing filter means that out of the millions upon millions of webpages out there, only a tiny minority are intelligently put together or even actually useful. The problem when you give publishing to the people and consider that a good thing, is that you forget that publishing is the end result of a chain of events that are based around the sequencing of ideas. It’s the flashy bit, but it’s not the clever bit.

The most important person in the publishing chain of author, editor, typesetter, publisher and printer is the editor, the person that’s employed to make sure that what gets published is original, thoughtful, responsible and competently put together. Without the editor, you have a million monkeys pounding away on a million typewriters.

This is why wikipedia is so successful, it’s information presented with a QC filter. If someone writes something libellous or factually inaccurate, it can be changed. IT’s not without it’s problems – it’s written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to the website and there has been some controversy over its reliability and accuracy. The site receives criticism for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality and inconsistency, systemic bias, and preference for consensus or popularity over credentials.

On the other hand, it’s free distribution, constant and plentiful updates, diverse coverage, lack of advertising, and versions in numerous languages make it a winner. Other than the world wide web, wikipedia reminds me of something else.

I met Douglas Adams once. It was a great day, one of the fondest memories I have of my childhood. I was 11 and had been reading the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy and loving it. I talked to my mum about it, and one Tuesday morning, I got up to go to school. I put my uniform on and we got in the car as normal and I worried about the homework I hadn’t done for the test I wasn’t ready for. I was seriously nervous about school that day.

However, when we got to my school, mum slowed down, then just drove past. She left it until then to tell me she had seen a notice in the newspaper that Douglas Adams was doing a signing in Dublin that day, so that’s where we were going.

I don’t think I’ve ever been happier, at least, not as a kid.

It was quite a big deal for her, because it was a two hour drive and she had to skip out of work to bring me. It was so worth it though, and to this day, I measure happiness against that moment, and probably Christmas Eve when I was 10. (I got the Millennium Falcon from Santa.) We met him and talked for a while. He was a very cool guy, and I still have a complete collection of the first couple of Hitch Hikers books that he signed for me that day.

Anyway, In his books, his characters carry hand held computers, called the Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy. To all intents and purposes, he had secribed wikipedia 20 years before it came into being. A good idea is a good idea. Like ditching school.