In praise of information

Darcy well remembers, in the heady days of the early 1990s, his first encounter with the Internet. Sitting at his computer late at night, he would enter search words into his browser (yahoo, one believes), and then click on all the links that came up. Or try to. The problem was that it was exceedingly difficult to sift the dross from the more worthwhile stuff. The same problem prevails today, even though Google is somewhat of an improvement.

Enter "life" and search in Google. You get approximately 986 million hits. If one spent 1 second perusing each, one would have to spend 43 years or so doing so. Which, given the need to sleep and to eat, is probably beyond my span. And the most popular? Life.com, "America's weekend magazine", which appears to be aimed at an alphabetically challenged viewership. Skipping the second most popular link (we shall come back to it later), we see USA Today in third place ("Entertainment News: Celebrity gossip blogs, photos, videos"), the EU Commission in fourth place ("Environment - Life") - no doubt a worthy site - then LIFE ("The UK's leading pro-life charity"), followed in sixth place by Lifetimetv.com.

The problem is that none of these sites really describes Life. It gets progressively more bizarre ("Riding herd on succulent Kobe beef", "Become a chiropractor", "True life, Deidre dating, travel, motors, Woman, Mystic Meg" before (one would hope) getting back on track. The problem is that the Internet has become very difficult to use, if one is searching for information.

Which brings us back to the second most popular site. Http://en.wikipedia.org/. And if one clicks on this, page after page of relevant stuff, reasonably sorted (so that life in the biology sense is easily distinguishable from, say, The Game of Life, (which is apparently a popular board game someplace where people can't get enough of the real thing) appears on one's screen. Glancing through Wikipedia, one can sometimes encounter silly errors, but in those areas where Darcy claims some expertise, he has generally found the entries to be satisfactory. Certainly, the information content does not appear to be less than Darcy's copies of Britannica or Larousse. As Darcy was brought up to value information and has since become something of a junky, Wikipedia appears to be the modern answer to his dreams. And therefore, in his first venture into a space of his own in the Internet, Darcy chooses to pay tribute to both Wikipedia and its parent, the Wikimedia Corporation. Most honourable mention must also be made of the contributors to the various Wiki sites, without which Darcy would not be able to find quick, often apposite answers to his myriad daily questions. While the span of his years may still be insufficient to read the 1.7 million articles in English alone (a number which is increasing daily), Darcy thanks them all.