Did anyone ever collect all n items of those kids toy sets?
They used to advertise these sets all the time as if all children derived some sort of pleasure or satisfaction from collecting every cheap piece of made-in-china plastic.
Collect all 25 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Toys from McDonalds!
Collect all 10 Official Star Wars Revenge of the Sith novelty cups from Burger King!
Collect all 3 Kellogg’s Indiana Jones Light-Up Mystery Spoons from boxes of specially marked Kellogg’s Mini Wheats!
Damnit, what am I going to do with 3 Kellogg’s Indiana Jones Light-Up Spoons? Am I supposed to search some caves for ancient Kellogg’s Indiana Jones Light-Up artifacts? Maybe I’ll go dig up the Ark of the Kellogg’s Covenant, explore the Kellogg’s Temple of Doom, and if I get hungry, I’ll eat a bowl of Kellogg’s Fruit Loops out of the Kellogg’s Light-Up Holy Grail.
I bet the people who collected these things as children will grow up to the be the same people who collect all 24 Olympic coins, or collect all 15 Legends of Nascar commemorative plates.
It seems like everyone I know has some sort of irrational suspicion of Wikipedia. People love to quote the mantra “don’t cite Wikipedia”. They refuse to trust anything found on the site and they criticize others for referencing it. Recently, Josh was amused by the fact that his professor used material from the site in class. Most other professors explicitly forbid the use of Wikipedia for any academic work.
People think Wikipedia is somehow less credible than any other site on the internet. I say Wikipedia is at least as trustworthy as other sites if not more so.
Anti-Wikipedia advocates often bring up these arguments against the site but clearly they haven’t given the matter much thought:
But anyone can add content to Wikipedia! - This is true. In fact, Anyone can add content to the internet. There are plenty of free web hosts out there and anyone with basic reading comprehension skills could probably figure out how to start their own private “online encyclopedia”. The fact that Wikipedia makes it easy for content to be added has no bearing on whether or not you should trust it - or if it does, why would you trust any internet site?
But if you link to a Wikipedia page, it might not be the same later! - Wrong. Wikipedia keeps a record of every page each time it is changed. You can link to the current version, or a specific edit if you’re worried about the content changing. Furthermore, other websites don’t have this functionality. So in this respect, Wikipedia is actually a step ahead of the pack. If “Rod’s Reptile Repository” changes its content, the old content is gone. If someone edits the “reptile” page on Wikipedia though, the old content is still there.
Wikipedia isn’t a 100% factual source, but it’s good enough. Most “vandalism” edits are reverted within a few minutes or hours of being added. Take this one for example. My friends and I were bored one day in class so we edited a few minor details of Roy Sullivan’s life. Within a few days, the edits were all reverted.
The problem isn’t that people think Wikipedia is untrustworthy. It’s not perfect. The real problem is that people don’t understand that Wikipedia is just another site on the internet.