The "beef"

Ilya asked me, "where is the beef?" I initially performed a google search to find, where exactly, the inter-beef was. I figured if I could find some semblance of it online then perhaps I would be able to answer Ilya's question. Using "beef" as a google search query quickly yielded approximately fifty-five million hits. The number two hit was, of course, wikipedia. My train of thought diverted from what the contents of the number one hit might be (the national cattleman's beef association, www.beef.org) to how does wikipedia score in, how do you say in english, vague search term queries. I decided to perform a little sampling.

First, I searched for the term "duck." Wikipedia scores number one. Next, I typed in alligator. Wikipedia scores number two. I'm beginning to think that if there is a topic that has any chance of being in wikipedia, it will score at least in the top five. Amino acids, gravity and blog as google search queries all returned with wikipedia as the number one hits. What about older or more esoteric topics? I performed two searches; first i searched for "jazzercise," then i searched for "speedo." Wikipedia still scores in the top ten, only beat out by the websites of the search terms' namesake.

Maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion, but I'm beginning to get worried that every piece of knowledge that was ever available will be concatenated to a wiki. I'm worried that the idea of doing research on a topic is becoming so convenient that people are going to lose the skill to look into real books to confirm or invalidate what the wiki is telling them.

I understand the convenience and utility of having a one-stop reference for everything you ever need to know. I believe that in the days before the internet (right after the invention of the wheel), youngsters would use an encyclopedia as an means of investigating something outside their sphere of influence. After all, that is how i learned about sand dollars and shark whales. However, where are the checks and balances for wikipedia? Supposedly it's the community as a whole. But, if there is no direct authority (as in the case of editors for an encyclopedia) who can guarantee the fact checking? I'm sure that this is not the first time that someone has criticized the merits of wikipedia, however, I want to point out that I'm not discounting it. I'm just pissed.

I'm pissed because today I decided to finally start doing the research for the book I've been talking about for the past four years. I'm pissed because as soon as I started searching online to see what has been done recently for the subjects of interest, I found complete wiki's for the entire one hundred sixteen chapters of my book. Of course they were all correctly written with more depth, references and prettier pictures than I could have done. Of course I could have "paraphrased" all of it, but how would that have made a good book? It wouldn't. Why publish something that is already freely available. Damn you wiki, you win this battle. I'm going to get on writing my next book before it becomes a wiki itself.

There's the fucking beef, Ilya. Thanks for reminding me.