Tag Archives: Wikipedia

Caving out Wikipedia

You know as much as I talk up Wikipedia I had never bothered to become a member until just recently. I had even set up my own wikis before diving in, go figure.
Anywho I recently went on a spelunking trip out to Buckner’s Cave in Indiana and jumped on the web to scout out something on the cave on my phone on the way there in the car. Much to my dismay I discovered only a website from 8 years ago and a tiny piece of a Wikipedia entry. I decided it was time to put my knowledge to use and signed up to write an article.
Anyway for those of you who don’t know Buckner’s Cave is a cave outside of Bloomington, Indiana privately owned and operated by the Richard Blenz Nature Conservancy and is free access, assuming you contact them a week in advance.

The experience was spectacular! Three miles of cave with endless off-shoots and passages ranging from enormous caverns to tight squeezes where you have to push your bag first and wedge your shoulders side-ways. We went in without a real good idea of its layout and features and found it to be quite the adventurous exploration! I had the unpleasant experience of being the leader down a long mud tunnel that progressively shrunk smaller and smaller until it dead-ended and I couldn’t go any further… which meant I had to tell the 8 people behind me to back out army-crawl style backwards. We discovered cavern after passage after cavern, and explored in all sorts of directions and rock environments. On the way back we found ourselves lost (a few times actually) only to be saved by a bat who was in the same spot we left him the first time.
Once out from underground I paged up Wikipedia and wrote my very first official entry, officially wiping out the request for it to be expanded. Huzzah!

What Wikipedians Search For

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~leon/stats/wikicharts/index.php?lang=en&wiki=enwiki&ns=articles&limit=100&month=04%2F2007&mode=view continually calculates the most viewed pages on each of all the "Wikipedian projects":www.wikimedia.org offered. The above link is preset to view the top 100 articles viewed during April 2007 for "English Wikipedia":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. In case you were wondering, 11% of the top viewed articles involved some sexual content and the number one searched definition in "English Wiktionary":http://wiktionary.org/ was "MILF":http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/MILF. Aren't you glad to know that one of the "most visited sites in the world":http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=global&lang=none is being put to good use.

Conservative answer to Wikipedia

Conservapedia, the religious right’s answer to the “liberal” and uber-popular Wikipedia has been having server errors lately as a small amount of press has triggered more traffic than usual. When I heard about the site, self-described as “an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America,” I went there and tried a number of links (“liberal bias in Wikipedia”, “American History”, “the Commandments”) finding none that actually worked. I then searched for the one article that should have surely worked:
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