Wikipedia Is Better Than You Realize

Wikipedia is a bountiful catalog of information from the mitochondria of the cell to Cleopatra, but without any of the malvertising or any other kind of useless advertising other popular sites may give to you. There you will find nothing but information created by humans for research and learning. From the beginning in 1995 it was first initially designed to be a part of Wikipedia and Wikipedia was only refereed as “wiki.” Later on Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger registered Wikipedia in the beginning of 2001 and launched the site shortly after with its very first edit, the Home Page, Marking it’s first day of Wikipedia’s history. After one month there were 237 articles, one year 27,491 articles, 1 million articles by May of 2006 and now after a wonderful 25 years there are over 7 million articles in English and millions more in other languages too!

Wikipedia 25th aniversary animated logo: Ballons in the shape of the numbers 25 popping out of the top of the wikipedia globe

Around June of last year, we swapped out our old boring old homepage for something that we thought would be temporary, Wikipedia, before then we did love Wikipedia for looking further into subjects that interested us, however we never truly *perused* the site to its full capabilities. We decided the English Main Page would be best as it shows you a featured article from the millions that exist and top news as well. Scrolling down there’s even more interesting things like ‘Did You Know,’ ‘On This Day,’ ‘Featured List,’ and ‘Featured Picture.’

At first we didn’t really think too much about it and honestly we didn’t really feel connected as much as per the *temporary* vibe we initially situated it, that was until one day we saw an article in the featured articles that caught our interest. On the 25th of September Wikipedia Home Page there was an article about the Joan Collection with an image of a jacket with Victorian-era children printed on it. As a huge punk clothing girl, it kinda rung hard towards us.

Snippet showing the Jacket printed with Daguerreotype of three girls, Carl Gustav Oehme 1845

After that, we took a bit more time to experience it and while not always a hit of interest, they do often have something that is interesting to read and a banger photo of the day. Recently we started questioning “why do we go online and use the internet?” and after questioning that we realized that our habit of using the internet was slowly skewed from bettering ourselves- to a form of escapism. Instead of fulfilling our own promise of improving and sharing our knowledge, we were filling our time with filler and never instilling our own knowledge on, well- anything. This was on our mind for the longest time and even is the sole reason why we started this site and blog! Any who, that conversation is more of another blog subject later :3

You may be wondering, what does Wikipedia have to offer? Well as the main bit is a huge Encyclopedia for various languages (however, its mostly in English.) But wait! There’s more! Like Commons Free Media Repository, Wikiversity, Wikiquote, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikinews and more volunteer projects! For now we want to talk about the two we really like the most and suggest that you guys check out what else they have.

Wikiversity

Set learning free with Wikiversity, a collection of learning resources, projects and research in all grade levels for anyone to come by and use the resources to learn any subject they like. Everything is curated from teachers, students, and researchers alike in the development of an open educational resource and collaborative learning communities.

They offer all the basic subjects that everyone should have access to like the Arts, Math, Science, History, Technology and Language as well as several other higher lever subjects that are up to University standing.

Currently we have been using Wikiversity for the Spanish Course along side our Spanish text book and so far we have found it pretty helpful. Once were in a pretty fluent spot with Spanish we are wanting to go for learning German, Dutch, Japanese and some other languages. Sooner than later were also going to be focusing on learning Coding and Computer Science.

Outline drawing depicting greek philosiphers in deep discussion

Wikinews

Wikinews is a Neutral Point of View citizen journalism in 31 languages with over 1.7 million articles and there are almost 800 active editors. (Note: Wikinews like many other citizen news sites are sometimes biased and not truly neutral, however its a lot better than other news sites, you know?) While the main Wikipedia does have news articles covered and summarized Wikinews further delves into subjects without having to tie to other sites and their leniencies.

We mostly get it to grab quick important news usually in the “News today” portion of the Wikipedia Homepage and its helped keeping up with things especially with whats happening in USA while living in Spain. We do keep up on tabs with USA because we do have some friends and family that live there and it is our home country. Note we want to say: DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH! Never believe the first thing you read especially when it comes to incrimination or important policy change.

First logo of Wiki news of a newspaper with the name Wikinews at the top

While Wikipedia is probably our favorite community curated website, its not the only one around. Here are a few other critical and important sites that we feel like are well deserving to be known, supported or even give you a new place to contribute to:

Internet Archive

A non-profit library of 90 million archived Books, movies, music and all other medias and over 1 trillion archived websites. We’ve even backed up garbodog.com (this site) when we can remember. Normally however, we watch old cartoons, old shows, read Public books and make sure were not going crazy with YouTube changing one single thing on it’s site.

GitHub

With 180 million Developers and 420 Repositories, GitHub is the space to share your code, easily collaborate with others and even find new software projects that can help you with your day! You have no idea how many times we have had our day saved from GitHub projects specifically made for problems that we’ve had.

Open Street Maps

Most if not all people use Google Maps and while its a corner stone of every diver, Open Street Maps is the unsung hero for all developers across the globe with easy to update sources by millions of active users and free APIs to help anyone in need of a free map for their project. Honestly OSM is a hit or miss as it depends on how many contributers are in your area, but as a huge map loving geek, we do love organizing and setting up areas in OSM for fun.

A classic painted cover of a show called The Big Brain

Overall Wikipedia is one of the many unsung heroes of information on the internet, a collection of knowledge we should pride and cherish more. Many teachers may say that Wikipedia cannot be used as a source and that’s only because its willing to change (fun fact, the sources that Wikipedia uses are allowed for academic sourcing.)

What is your favorite Wikipedia article? Personally it has to be the the of Animals Awarded Human Credentials. Probably hard to beat x)

-PJ, Kuro, Basil2026-2-26