{"id":19701,"date":"2013-04-03T11:07:02","date_gmt":"2013-04-03T16:07:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=19701"},"modified":"2014-09-11T11:42:43","modified_gmt":"2014-09-11T15:42:43","slug":"oh-you-must-mean-the-other-michael-moynihan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/04\/03\/oh-you-must-mean-the-other-michael-moynihan\/","title":{"rendered":"Oh, you must mean the other<\/em> Michael Moynihan!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia<\/em> is a great resource, that has justifiably relegated printed encyclopedias to the dustiest, most distant part of the bookshelves. It does, however, have a few minor drawbacks … as Michael Moynihan<\/a> explains:<\/p>\n

It came to me in Prague. Or possibly Copenhagen. But to minimize confusion, let\u2019s agree upon Prague. I assume I was being unbearably pretentious, sitting beneath one of those baroque sculptures on Charles Bridge (or was it one of those other, less beautiful bridges spanning the Vltava River?), a tattered Tom Stoppard play stuffed in my back pocket (or possibly Kafka?), the Plastic People of the Universe on my headphones (could have been Dvo\u0159\u00e1k). It was here, leafing through back issues of the Prague Post<\/em> and Prognosis<\/em>, that I was inspired to print 10,000 copies of a muckraking, nakedly ideological newspaper of my own. To be launched in Sweden. To be called the Spectator<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I must confess that these images of Prague \u2014 in all of its inspirational grandeur \u2014 are cribbed either from Milan Kundera\u2019s The Unbearable Lightness of Being<\/em> or INXS\u2019s video for \u201cNever Tear Us Apart.\u201d Because despite what my Wikipedia<\/em> entry tells me, I\u2019ve never been to the Czech Republic.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

It\u2019s possible to quibble with or contest every second sentence in my encyclopedia entry, which quickly cratered my confidence in the website. But there are plenty of studies suggesting that Wikipedia<\/em> is, despite its ability to be edited by anyone with excess free time and an Internet connection, about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica<\/em>. It also has the benefit of being up to the minute: when news breaks, when a public figure dies, details are added to Wikipedia<\/em> almost immediately. A fact check of important subjects with multiple editors \u2014 Darwinism, Squeaky Fromme, the Boxer Rebellion \u2014 suggests that the website is broadly trustworthy, terrific at aggregating links, and a worthy springboard to better material.<\/p>\n

But what of those entries covering the hopelessly insignificant, like me? I won\u2019t bore you by cataloguing all the mistakes in my entry (I found about a dozen), but the results weren\u2019t terribly impressive. I\u2019m unsure how long it remained on the page, but according to Wikipedia<\/em>\u2019s edit log, my biography once claimed that I had a \u201cvagina\u201d and \u2014 pardon the language \u2014 \u201clove the cock.\u201d The only people who can refute the first point are, I hope, biased in my favor and wouldn\u2019t be trusted by Wikipedia<\/em> as \u201creliable sources.\u201d The second point, also difficult to disprove, seems irrelevant to the job of polemicist.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wikipedia is a great resource, that has justifiably relegated printed encyclopedias to the dustiest, most distant part of the bookshelves. It does, however, have a few minor drawbacks … as Michael Moynihan explains: It came to me in Prague. Or possibly Copenhagen. But to minimize confusion, let\u2019s agree upon Prague. I assume I was being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,15],"tags":[995,213,283,444],"class_list":["post-19701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-technology","tag-czechrepublic","tag-newspapers","tag-sweden","tag-wikipedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-57L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19701"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27789,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19701\/revisions\/27789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}