The first time I poked around in Wikipedia, which was back in September of 2001, I started the article on violas. It looked like this. It seemed to fit in just fine back then. I didn’t think much of Wikipedia as a reference work at the time and moved on to other things.
Lately though, I’ve been using Wikipedia quite a bit, even to the point of spending a few hours randomly clicking through articles. As an online source of nerdly trivia it is unrivalled. The standards have vastly improved to the extent that when I felt compelled to expand on a few articles it wasn’t sufficient to bang out a few sentences, I felt I like I could only do my bit by writing a detailed plot summary and character list, scanning the cover of a first edition book, or uploading pictures taken in Turkey.
Of course, there are parts of it that are like anything else you find online: narrow in focus to the point of uselessness or not even accurate. I leave it to today’s Onion to put the appropriate viewpoint on it.
“It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary,” said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone.
