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Showing posts from February, 2007

Why Wikipedia Wins

I've noticed all sorts of articles, blogs, radio and TV shows etc, using Wikipedia as a source especially in the last year. Often times it's used with tongue slightly in-cheek -- ie. can you believe this? -- but the trend is only going to become more pronounced. Why? As long as an article idea doesn't instantly offend other contributers either because of spam/commercial concerns, obscurity or axe-grinding you can create it. Thus any reporter looking for information on any subject may end up there first since "Google is just a frontend to Wikipedia".  If you've written something remotely interesting it will be adopted by other editors, expanded and made into great little bundles of knowledge. I can't begin to list the number of articles that I've started with just the notion that "there should be an article about this" and created a short stub and look back a year or three later to see a great entry. It's like magic.  Of course, you can

Random Downtown Evening

I haven't blogged for a while so here's a diary entry: On Highland Ave just west of Elizabeth where everything's getting built on the north side, they had carefully scrubbed down the facade of the old Grinnell Sprinkler building (they waterproofed many buildings back in the day but not the Winecoff !) but this morning when I drove by the whole thing was being torn down. Oh well, at the least the building next door is being saved for a restaurant. For lunch we tried a new place (for us), Papi's Eastern Cuban at Myrtle and Ponce. Their pork special was awesome, more like street food than Las Palmeros on 5th. Not sure if that's an east-west thing :) Tonight, scheduled to meet the wife downtown so I walked to the train station. Noticed all the fences had been taken down along those goofy Inman Station condos: the brick columns are still there but all metal and wood fences are gone. No game at Philips but there was still a decent crowd at CNN Center . Noticed Rimini