What’s so great about Wikipedia?

I hear a lot of people say that Wikipedia is a disreputable source of information because anyone can edit articles. Most of these people who distrust Wikipedia do so because an equally uninformed friend told them they should. Yes, vandalism on Wikipedia is a problem, but is not a major problem like some alarmists would have you believe.

The truth is that Wikipedia is a masterpiece of collaborative work and knowledge. Almost all articles are written by experts. It contains an incredible amount of information in an easily accessible and traversable format. It is free knowledge. It is a triumph of truth over profiteering and is a vanguard of positive change in the information revolution.

If 1% of Wikipedia contributors are vandals the other 99% are the good people who share knowledge and fix mistakes. Most contributors are just know-it-all nerds who want to share their knowledge with other people and make the world a better-informed place. I should know, I’m one of them. Mistakes and vandalism are fixed promptly as broken windows are in any decent area of town, because Wikipedia isn’t a slum — it’s a university.

In related news, the information revolution is underway.  Videos about the evolving nature of information after the jump:

Our high-dimensional world

According to our primitive senses, we live in a 4-dimensional world. Three of these are spatial dimensions — if we look at a cardboard box, or a desk, or a fridge, we can see that it has height, depth, and width. The fourth dimension that we perceive is time, and it’s no small feat to truly get that time is a dimension just like height, depth, and width.

Now imagine somebody who just couldn’t comprehend that there are more than two dimensions (if it makes it more plausible, let’s say this person has no depth perception and cannot move their head in any way). They argue, “I can see left and right, that’s the first dimension, and I can see up and down, that’s the second dimension.” You try to explain the concept of depth, and they don’t understand. You try to explain the concept of time as a dimension, and they really don’t understand. Don’t even start about relativity theory because you don’t even understand that, so how on earth could they? They see life in this world like we see a photograph. Unchanging. Flat. An accurate but unliving, unenlightened representation.

But we’re not so enlightened ourselves, seeing the world in all its four-dimensional grandeur. Our prophets (physicists) have spoken with god (the universe) and apparently there are likely between 10 and 26 dimensions. Life as we know it is a flat representation of reality. A photograph. An unliving snapshot. We live in this universe and we cannot even begin to fathom the lush and vivid truth.