I hope Wikipedia doesnt go bankrupt it will feel like the end times . I think I will literally panic

Encyclopedia Britannica is always there

there’s this place called a library. and they have these things called books. and then there’s this thing called Google Search. where you can find books in PDF form.

Wikipedia is user edited. you can literally put anything you want in an entry almost. I think you know where I’m about to go with this.

You’re condescending and annoying. I am attached to Wikipedia out of sentimentality it’s always been there for as long as I remember and reliable to me for some casual trivia. Wikipedia is iconic and I love her. go write a research paper or something

who let high school teachers find tumblr

me: hm i wonder how many countries drive on the same side as the UK

friend: let’s check wikipedia in 2 seconds on our phones

some asshole on tumblr: um excuse me why don’t you stop what you’re doing to go to the library and look it up in an outdated book that’s edited maybe twice a decade and that definitely doesn’t have a single page article called “list of countries with left-hand traffic”

also “user edited” really doesn’t mean as much as you think it does. there are millions of people displaying accurate information, for every one person displaying inaccurate information. and that inaccurate information is usually changed quickly, and the person who made it can get their ip blocked from wikipedia if it was bad enough. way more accurate than textbooks or a library.

Librarian here! I’ve worked at both academic (college/university) and public libraries, and let me tell you this: most print encyclopedias are useless garbage we can’t get rid of fast enough. With the exception of subject-specific sets which we need to buy again every few years because the information has become outdated, most of the information in any volume of an encyclopedia is far more accessible and far more in-depth on the internet. 

Wikipedia as a reference resource is fantastic because, just like print encyclopedias, it serves as a jumping-off point for research… and so do librarians! A librarian isn’t going to just write your paper for you, we’re going to point you to the books, articles, and websites that contain the information. Wikipedia is great for that, too, because any article that gets more than a bit of traffic will wind up with sources and external links. But print encyclopedias don’t go that far in citing their sources, and because they’re static media, the references may not only be outdated, they might be entirely inaccessible due to age, obscurity, or cost of access.

And there’s an interesting thing about all those books we have on the shelves… anyone can write one, and usually they only have a handful of other people checking their work. Academic journals are somewhat notorious for the ease with which a completely falsified paper can see publication (especially in cases of electronic journals), but printed books can also be easily falsified, whether as a result of publishers with an agenda or just fact-checkers slacking off.  

 As has been pointed out above, wikipedia is really great at getting obscenely specific in terms of the topics of articles. It’s an amazing collection of data, and more importantly, it’s an amazing collection of sources of data.

The role of a reference librarian and a wikipedia editor are basically the same: show you a brief summary of the information you need, and point you to more in-depth, reliable sources.

I was helping a friend clear out their dad’s old stuff from their home recently and we came across encyclopedias from the 90s.

They all went to the dump. They were ASTOUNDINGLY outdated. Totally fucking useless.

High school English teacher here–I regularly get crap from some of my colleagues, but I am completely fine with students using Wikipedia for info. Wikipedia does an excellent job of flagging articles that have been recently edited until someone can verify the changes, so pages with inaccurate info often have giant warnings at the top saying “THIS PAGE MAY CONTAIN IANCCURATE INFO”. Won’t find that in an out-of-date print edition.

Not only that, but Wikipedia cites its sources. It tells you right at the bottom of the page where all its info came from, so if you want to use a fact from Wikipedia but don’t want a teacher annoyed with you, just cite the source in the footnote. Teachers and professors are (a) not likely to check up on this and (b) it’s a real source so even if they do it’s legit?

The biggest problem I have had with letting students use Wikipedia is actually that Wikipedia articles are often written in such academic language that students sometimes struggle to understand them. That part kids have to overcome on their own or with the help of their teacher. But there’s nothing wrong with Wikipedia as a source. Hatred for it is a remnant of academic elitism, thinking that “peer-reviewed” can only mean some handful of crusty white dudes instead of literally anyone with enough knowledge and motivation to review it.

Honestly. My dad is a college professor and he’s told me time and again to always start my research at Wikipedia. You have to go further, obviously, but its such a great jumping off point for information.

Plus, where else can I find an itemized and updated list of every Cryptid known to human kind?

For the impenetrable articles, here’s my tip.

The list of other languages in the sidebar? Look at it and check whether the article has a version in Simple English.

Simple English is a mode for non-native English speakers but is also great if your reading comprehension is not super good, you’re having a slow brain day for any mental health or developmental disorder reason, or the English version is just poorly written.

Librarian here, and this whole post gives me so much joy.

@sugargroupie, @turtletotem

I feel like people think “not a reliable source” means “not true” but it actually means “can’t be quoted because the words might change”

I never knew there was a simple English version? I learned something new!

‘Just use EB/the library’

Ah yes, because these are absolutely going to have:

The filmography for a foreign voice actor(or any voice actor really)

The updated episode list of an ongoing tv show + the cast list

Alphabetize lists of gods/goddesses/various mythical creatures from around the world, ordered by type and region(i.e list of sun gods from around the world, organized by region and alphabetized)

24/7 access because I want to look something up at 2am

This is coming from me, the college professor. If you’re beginning research or don’t understand a topic start with Wikipedia. No, you can’t cite Wikipedia, but part of the difficulty students run into with academia is not understanding the language. So if you’re trying to research something, and some guy named Roland Barthes keeps popping up? Heck, yeah, you should Wikipedia and get a vague idea who he is. And then, you can look at Wikipedia’s sources. Or related topics to figure out keywords to search properly. So no, you can’t use Wikipedia as an academic source, but it’s a great starting point if you’re trying to figure out where to go. If you’re reading an article in a library on the Marquis de Sade and the Kantian sublime, and you’ve no idea what either of those are, it doesn’t do you any good. Because guess what? If you’re reading academic articles, they are rarely going to explain who the Marquis de Sade or Kant are because they’ll assume you already know. 

Oh, and those encyclopedias? They aren’t academic either.

Wait! Is there a possibility that Wikipedia is going to go bankrupt?

Ah yes, tomorrow is the time to remove the mystery cubes from beneath the festive cone and tell tales of a large red intruder

I love the mystery cubes! I hope you remembered to listen to the music that you only listen to at this time of year

this is my last one…. are u a pro or anti sushi person…. are u a pro or anti milk person….. & are u a pro or anti pineapple pizza person…

I still haven't worked out if these are sarcastic or not yet

They could see a world reborn…

Barnaby Joyce Fact #4

He’s got a bag full of potatoes in the back seat of his car and he loves it. He calls it Jerry and lets it ride in the front sometimes when Jerry is good. Jerry is his best friend.

Jean-Claude Van Damme Quotes (via shopno)

Reblog if you want a terrible, 3 sentence fan fiction in your ask, based on your url

THIS HAS OVER 40,000 NOTES AND WITHIN FIFTEEN MINUTES I FOUND THIS IN MY MESSAGES:

“and then i saw him walk across the room. he got very close to me and whispered “back that sass up”“

80,000 NOTES AND I GOT ONE!

“ He descended upon me, that pink archangel, with those pink and ripe nipples. “

12 minutes “Oh not. Not another fire bender!” I said to myself. But then he came up behind me and grabbed my ass. So he’s cool now I guess 288,250 notes

HALF AN HOUR AT MOST “Its okay,” he said leaning his walking stuck against the wall and removing the young man’s glasses “ let me frost your roll” matt the blind cinnamon roll blushes as his core softened for his new lover.

18 years ago when I was coming out, y’all made the word “bisexual” so dirty that for years the only word I felt was accessible to me was “queer”, if I had any chance at having a community. 

Queer was widely used at that point among LGBT+ people to refer to ourselves and our community, and while you’d look askance at a straight person using that word, it was most definitely acceptable to call another LGBT+ person queer.

And now y’all are telling me “Queer” isn’t an acceptable umbrella term to use and it just feels like another way you’re using subtle language policing to tell me that really the only people you want in your community are gold-star LG folks. 

Those of us who like the word queer because it accurately reflects our misfit status are basically being told that this self-identifier is dirty and wrong, this is no longer the “queer community”, and the message yet again is that we don’t really belong.

I get it if someone doesn’t want to be called queer, and I would never call another person queer against their will but holy hell please stop acting like it’s common knowledge that queer can’t be used as an umbrella term for our community when it was for DECADES

“q-slur” is a very new concept, kids.

This is something that’s completely overlooked, by the same people who fling the word “ahistorical” at every viewpoint they disagree with.

When I first started participating in any kind of LGBTQ+ stuff online (so, 10 years ago), “queer” was by far the most common descriptor. It was pretty much agreed it had been reclaimed enough to be safe (I mean, show me an active slur that has academic disciplines named after it?) and people seemed much more keen to explore the ambiguity the term offers, rather than sticking with predefined categories. By “q-slur” logic, we should’ve been much less accepting of it back then if we simultaneously believe that LGBTQ+ rights are advancing over time, but the opposite is true.

So I would say that the current stigmatization of queer is based on two things: 1) reactionary essentialism (seeing “queer” as too dangerous for the more clear-cut categories), and 2) respectability politics.

Now by taking away “queer”, we don’t have any other term that’s both catchy (no version of the abbreviation is) and broad enough to actually be inclusive. Gay is not an umbrella term. It always has a default connotation that’s very specific. It only reminds me of all the time I wasted on bad gay-only discourse when I was first questioning my own identity, and for this reason it took ages to arrive at the conclusion that I’m just attracted to multiple genders and also trans without dysphoria (because the other bullshit I had to contend with was the truscum narrative of transness). So, gay is not a safe term for me. It doesn’t describe me and if I used it, it would actually misgender my own relationship. I’m not doing that for any of you, sorry.

Do you know who the majority of the people who still use “queer” are? Trans and MGA. Yet again, we have a political line that privileges cis LG people who are fine with binary categories over the most routinely erased parts of the community. Of course.

This, I imagine, is also why so many bi/pan and trans/nonbinary people aren’t against aces being included. Chances are most of us, at least those who are 25+ or so, have experiences like this, with either being actively policed out or just unable to find the right identifiers for ages because of the stigma and general ignorance surrounding them.

And now you’re telling us we HAVE TO use gay, which isn’t a functional umbrella term, because queer suddenly isn’t acceptable based on this new logic? Do you even hear yourselves?

–

“But!” I can already hear the gatekeepers protest, “This all relies on a bunch of personal anecdotes!”

In which case, buddy, I have bad news for you about the vast majority of all modern LGBTQ+ history.

I first came upon Queer as both an umbrella term and a field of academic study. This was in the early 90s. There were queer studies, queer histories, “queering” of the text, queer theory…

And Queer, more so than other words, felt inclusive of people who, at the time, referred to themselves as “genderqueer” as well as people outside the binary, as well as bisexuals, who couldn’t claim gay or lesbian.

It was, at the time, being reclaimed at a time when all the words were being used as slurs, so there was a real reason to reclaim them.

I’ve problem with using words that people are comfortable using, but not at the cost of erasing parts of our history.

I guess now is the time we’re hitting New Essentialism and Respectability Politics 2.0 from people who aren’t old enough to remember any of this.

Queer is our term and you can pry it from my cold, queer, not remotely gay hands.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (via quotethat)

What adults do at work according to kids - Full video

i am so delighted by cats, i love that we have little bendy animals that climb all over everything and break shit and dart around our homes at top speed and we’re totally cool with it like “ah yes, there it goes again”

The Handsomest Boy.

Teenager 2000 : I love you Teenager 2015 : I want to fuck you

teenager 1854: the government cut off my hands because i stole a piece of bread

teenager 1200: alas i hath caught thine common cold an shall soon be Dead, i hath a good life, i hath sex thrice, twice with a female and once with a squirrel

teenager 390 bc: ehev, with the gavls having invaded rome, i have been captvred by drvids and shall now be bvrnt alive in one of their wicker effigies

TUMBLR NERDS I HAVE A CHALLENGE FOR YOU

HERE ARE THE STEPS: 1 - TAKE YOUR OLDEST FANDOM you know the one, that first thing you made art or wrote fic for, where you made all those really weird over the top OCs because you didn’t know any better 2 - TAKE YOUR NEWEST FANDOM yeah, that thing that you love and can’t stop thinking about right now 3- SMASH THEM TOGETHER like freakin’ conceptual play-doh 4 - MAKE SOMETHIN’ OUT OF IT make fic! art! a song! whatever!

HERE ARE THE RULES:

1- HAVE FUN WITH IT 2- THERE ARE NO RULES THIS IS CROSSOVER TOWN AND WE’VE STOPPED THE CAR IS GONE YOUR ROOM IS BOOKED AT THE OLD-TIMEY NERD MOTEL IT’S TIME TO DO SOMETHING STUPID

Michael Jones would be a firebender. Of this I am sure.

teen titans as warriors cats

Inuyasha has to master his Gem powers if he wants to save the Universe in the past and future.

I don’t know how the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would do in Thedas, but it would certainly be exciting.

ANIMORPHS MORPHING TEMMIES

Narnia and Orange is the New Black. Oh dear

Y’all, my life is ridiculous. So I’m out in the apartment common area with my dog as he is doing his important evening dog business, and I turn to see a group of older kids and tweens surrounding something and making excited noises.  One or two of the tweens are holding a stick, and I think, Oh, no, not again. My apartment complex is home to what I suppose is an exceedingly good-natured but not terribly bright armadillo who appears to have developed a taste for the kibble our neighbors leave out for their cats (I say “I suppose” because I’ve only dealt with this armadillo and thus have an n of 1 when it comes to judging armadillo personalities, but I digress).  There are a fair number of kids in our complex, and it’s a pretty safe place, so their parents let them wander in groups. Predictably, every few months they encounter and surround this armadillo, who stands there while one of the older boys pokes it with a stick. I kid you not.  Pokes a live armadillo with a stick.

Needless to say, I think this is not a nice way to treat an armadillo, particularly if this armadillo has been polite enough to tolerate being poked with a stick without biting someone, so every few months, I go over and break it up. “Y’all, is that the armadillo that lives around here?” I ask wearily as I walk over.  “C’mon, let ‘em be, that’s a wild animal, and you shouldn’t bother wild animals.” “Why?” one of the stick-wielding boys asks. Being more than a bit of a tree-hugging hippie, I say, “Because they are part of our ecosystem and have lives of their own and deserve our respect.” “Well, yeah, but why?” the boy retorts with a smirk.

I reply, “That should be reason enough all by itself, but wild animals can also carry diseases, so you should leave them alone.” “Like what?” the kid demands. Being a good med student, I blurt, “Like leprosy, that’s what!  Armadillos carry it in their paws!” “What’s leprosy?” one of the other kids asks. I open my mouth to ask them why they don’t know what leprosy is, haven’t they read or watched….? This is when I realize that the only time I can recall reading about leprosy was when I was studying for Step 2, possibly in Step Up to Medicine.  As I am standing there with my dog, staring down a pack of tweens in the dusky late twilight of our common area, I am quite certain I knew about leprosy before my third year of med school, but all I can think about is leprosy lives in the paws of armadillos, it attacks places like fingers and noses first because it is temperature-sensitive and those areas are relatively cool (presumably this is why it lives in armadillos’ paws, aside from how armadillos seem to be able to carry it and not get sick from it in the first place), the treatment is rifampin and dapsone, and add something else (maybe it starts with a c?) if it’s a drug-resistant strain, and rifampin can turn sweat and tears reddish-orange and also cause liver toxicity so monitor a patient’s LFTs closely.

This is not useful to think about when trying to convince a tween boy to stop poking an armadillo with a stick. “It’s when you become a leper!” I declare to buy myself some time, and luckily, one of the younger girls comes my rescue. “Is that one of the people Jesus healed?” she gasps, “Where their fingers and stuff rot off?” That sounded about right.  “Yep, that!” I agree eagerly.  “So leave the armadillo alone!  You can’t get sick by being around them, but don’t touch them!” The kids decide that if leprosy is what Jesus healed people of, they want no part in it.  The tween boys throw their sticks into the bushes, the kids scatter away from me, and the armadillo, my dog, and I are left staring at each other. “…Clofazamine,” I tell the armadillo.  “Rifampin, dapsone, and clofazamine.  Why did I remember that?” The armadillo did not seem to know why. Before I could ask the armadillo if leprosy was something Jesus cured, my dog started yodeling (he’s part Basenji and vocalizes like one), presumably to alert me to the presence of the armadillo. “Yes, thank you, I see the nice armadillo, let’s leave him be,” I tell my dog, and get his attention to start backing away.  The yodeling made the armadillo jump, and he turned around to wander good-naturedly off into the lavender remnants of the sunset. I looked it up when we got inside, and evidently Simon the Leper was cured by Jesus according to the books of Matthew and Mark in the Bible. Presumably Jesus did not have to monitor Simon’s LFTs afterward.

Reblog this picture of me holding a Family Size box of Honey Nut Cheerios? I’d really appreciate it.

How can I say no to such a great photo and such a polite request?

i will always support this post

@mooserattler back on my dash!

Why isn’t this at a million notes, yet, Dante???

I’m not sure. Hey lovely people who have taken me over half way to a cool million! If you’d like to reblog again, I’d love that, if not, I still love you, and hope you’re having a great day. I’m gonna go do some stand up tonight.

he is more powerful than god