April 2005

According to a Dublin-based corporate helpdesk that will remain nameless, if you want to send an image in an email, putting it in your signature will make it take less memory!

I've been using Wikipedia for looking up items of interest for quite a while now. For those unaware of it, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that is maintained by the general internet community (with some moderation to prevent vandalism and such, obviously). Frequently, after watching a film/documentary about a historical event/person, I'll look up their Wikipedia entries to get the whole story, particularly because of the tendency of movies to gloss over the areas of the story that don't suit the director's view of the event.

It's only yesterday that I realised just how dynamic the whole Wikipedia project really is. Just over an hour after yesterday's election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, I made my way to Ratzinger's wikipedia page to find out more about the new Pontiff, to discover that the entry had already been updated to reflect his new status (and name). This morning (about 16 hours after the election result was announced), the page had changed considerably, to offer a far more in-depth biography of someone who had just been elevated to a status deserving of it.

Of course, all the traditional elitists with their dust-covered copies of World Book and Encyclopedia Brittanica (along with everyone who spent good money on Encarta) still have John Paul II as the Pope when the kids go researching for a school project. This is a great example of Wikipedia becoming a seriously useful tool - now all they need is some investment to speed the damn thing up a bit!