Caught in the Web(page)

What are your favorite websites?

Do I have favorite websites? There are those places I love to hate: Facebook is one of these, and how many of us are sorry we sold our souls (and posted all those photos we probably have no other access to now) to the great and powerful Zuck?

Sidebar: yes, of course I mean Meta, that money-losing enterprise that planned to create the Metaverse, and which seemed to be attempting to re-invent what Second Life and its imitators have been doing for years. But I digress.

I’m not sure I really have any “favorite” websites, but I would like to say a few words about Wikipedia. When I gave the “How to do research for your paper” presentation in my Intro to Theatre class, I began by attacking Wikipedia as a poor resource. This stemmed from my discovery of errors on the ‘pedia.

You know how you think of something but you can’t quite remember a specific detail? Back in the last century, we’d just be driven mad by that. We might call a friend: “Do you know what song has the lyrics, ‘Something black, I want my baby back’?” (This song entered my head the other night, and this was my actual question.) And if they didn’t know, we’d have to wait until our own personal neural nets somehow made a connection back to that memory, like a 20th century switchboard operator plugging in just the right patch cord.

So now we have the World Wide Web and Google (et al) and Wikipedia, A few years back, I was trying to remember a specific play title by Christopher Marlowe, so I looked it up. And with my doctoral-level knowledge of Theatre, I knew that two of the plays attributed to Marlowe in that article were wrong. One was The Lady’s Not For Burning by Christopher Fry, not Marlowe; close, but not close enough.

And then one day I googled myself, just to see what I would see. And lo and behold, I had a Wikipedia page! I’m not sure who created it, but it was cool to see. Until I discovered three errors, including saying I attended OU, not OSU. I sent an email about it, and someone replied saying I could edit it myself. I still find it odd—because I could say literally anything about me—but I merely fixed the entries, added some (truthful) publication info, and went on my merry way.

I cited these reasons for students not trusting Wikipedia. “But!” I said, “When you find your playwright on Wikipedia, scroll to the bottom where it says ‘References,’ ‘Further Reading,’ and ‘External Links.’ There’s where you’ll find the best legit sources.”

If anyone checked my browser history when I was writing my novel, Watchers of the Dawn: A Steampunk Adventure, they may have wondered what I was up to. I used Wikipedia for my world-building, researching historical figures, events, and locations. It was invaluable, and along with a perpetual calendar and GoogleEarth, I could calculate and note the exact days the airship departed and landed for their various missions. And even if something was not precisely accurate historically, it was close enough for a retro-futuristic work of speculative fiction.

Incidentally, whenever I get the “please donate” screen on using Wikipedia, I do. I figure my donation is a small price to pay for a research assistant.

Unless ChatGPT or some other AI creation takes over that function.