Thank You, Captain Wikipedia.
Posted by Anonymous to Our Town and Its Business at 27 April 2016 at 23:29
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Captain Wikipedia is a good friend of this blog. I'm still getting used to the marvel of having it at my fingertips.
I especially love being able to find lyrics of just about every song or nursery rhyme ever composed.
I believe I know and love them all.
If I know something that Captain doesn't, I really get a lift out of that. It happens.
Mostly, it's just a great tool.
Nobody with a curious bent should feel awkward about using it and sharing what's learned.
A writer in his nineties named Roger Angell was a guest on Charlie Rose recently. His book just published was "This Old Man : All In Pieces." The book was about being an old man and the pieces were baseball stories he'd written in his journalist career. He was fiction editor and sports editor of the New Yorker Magazine. His mother was the magazine's fiction editor before him. The Magazine is not that old and I learned its history from a television feature.
Charlie has a universal curiosity but he really enjoys sports and hearing about the stars.
Mr. Angell wanted to talk about being old. When the niceties were over he went straight into an account of being at a gathering and joining a conversation. When he finished speaking, the discussion continued , as if he hadn't spoken. He told Charlie, it was like being invisible.
He caught my attention immediately but Charlie turned the talk to stories in the book about games and sports personalities. He wasn't listening. He wanted to talk about his interests. Charlie is never rude. He is an excellent host. But he did the very thing his guest wanted to talk about. He made him feel invisible.
Charlie had no interest in talking about an experience he had not yet shared. Roger Angell ,the man in his mid-nineties who wrote the book had something of interest to convey to a young man of sixty-four.
The old one did not persist. He understood. He knew what it was like to be sixty-four. Charlie doesn't know what it's like to be ninety-four.
What the author needed was a man of his own vintage for conversation and a chuckle about their shared experience. Maybe consider the advantage of being a fly on the wall.
He is content. He writes and spoke of the effort to do it well. What it takes to be readable.
Writing every day, makes the day worthwhile.
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3 comments:
There's nothing more convenient than Wikipedia if you're looking for some quick information, and when the stakes are low (you need a piece of information to settle a bet with your roommate, or you want to get a basic sense of what something means before starting more in-depth research), you may get what you need from Wikipedia. In fact, some instructors may advise their students to read entries for scientific concepts on Wikipedia as a way to begin understanding those concepts.
Nevertheless, when you're doing academic research, you should be extremely cautious about using Wikipedia. As its own disclaimer states, information on Wikipedia is contributed by anyone who wants to post material, and the expertise of the posters is not taken into consideration. Users may be reading information that is outdated or that has been posted by someone who is not an expert in the field or by someone who wishes to provide misinformation. (Case in point: Four years ago, an Expos student who was writing a paper about the limitations of Wikipedia posted a fictional entry for himself, stating that he was the mayor of a small town in China. Four years later, if you type in his name, or if you do a subject search on Wikipedia for mayors of towns in China, you will still find this fictional entry.) Some information on Wikipedia may well be accurate, but because experts do not review the site's entries, there is a considerable risk in relying on this source for your essays.
The fact that Wikipedia is not a reliable source for academic research doesn't mean that it's wrong to use basic reference materials when you're trying to familiarize yourself with a topic. In fact, the library is stocked with introductory materials, and the Harvard librarians can point you to specialized encyclopedias in different fields. These sources can be particularly useful when you need background information or context for a topic you're writing about.
There you go, Evelyn. You are saying how much you enjoy writing every day & the first comment out of the block is a lecture on how to do it properly. Someone did not listen to you.
A Blog is not a term paper. Evelyn can gather her sources as she may.
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