OneAndOneIs2

I was very slow to appreciate Wikipedia. All too often in its early days, when its fans were everywhere, proselyting to the masses, I would look up something I knew a fair amount about, only to find the entry lacking in quality, quantity, or neutrality. I gave up on it as a bad job - unlike open software, the open encyclopedia concept didn't seem to result in high-quality work. As somebody or other in the media said: Open-source code doesn't just have to be written: it has to compile and run; on wikipedia, all you have to do is write it and you're done.

So I tended not to bother with it.

The reason I mention this today is that we got new sofas delivered this morning.

I do great links, don't I?

Because we were expecting new sofas today, we threw the old ones out at the weekend. For the last couple days I've been unable to sit and read, therefore, as we've had no comfy chairs.

Now that we have sofas again, I've naturally had to test them out by sitting around and reading all afternoon. So I ran out of library books to read and had to fall back on my not-exactly-small personal collection. In the clearout that moving furniture around always seems to result in, I found one of the few Star Wars books I own.

Despite owning all the movies (Originals and remastered in the case of IV - VI) I've never been a huge fan of many books. I've read a lot, but not liked them enough to buy.

Revenge of the Sith is one of the exceptions. Not only because it doesn't suffer from the wooden acting making the plot hard to believe, but because Matthew Stover did a damn good job of writing. Just reading the introduction is enough to get the adrenalin going.

And when it gets onto the lightsaber fight between Dooku and the Jedi, it really starts to come into its own. The battle lasts about ten times longer than in the film, and there's a huge amount more background information about it. Not least of which is how they manage to go from Dooku having it all his own way at the start, to it becoming a battle for his life. Which he loses.

Simply put, the two of them use forms of lightsaber combat which they aren't all that skilled at, to make Dooku overconfident. Then they switch abruptly to the forms which they aren't just good at, but are Masters of. Hence the sudden turning of the tide...

If you're not a real SW geek, your reaction will probably be "Lightsaber forms? What do you mean, lightsaber forms?"

And THAT'S where Wikipedia comes into its own. The first time I found Wikipedia useful, exhaustively detailed, and highly accurate was when I was bored enough to look up details of lightsaber combat.

Pointless trivia, you might say, of interest only to geeks who dress up in silly costumes and queue for weeks to get cinema tickets. And you might be right, but still, it's interesting trivia.

And then I started looking up all kinds of OTHER entries about works of fiction. The Matrix. Transformers. Boneyard. Green Wing. etc. etc. Vast quantities of top-notch information. And finally, I admitted that Wikipedia COULD be a useful resource.

I even made a few edits to a couple of articles, something I had never bothered with before because there didn't seem to be any point. I even created the entry for one of my favourite childhood comic characters, The Comet, and made quite a few edits to the Boneyard entry - both somewhat obscure, but still worthwhile IMHO, titles.

Since then, Wikipedia has gone on to become the second engine in my Firefox search bar. There are a number of things I wouldn't like to rely on it as a source of information for, but when you're after less-contentious information, or willing to use standard research practices whilst gathering more 'serious' information, it's a really useful resource.

Still doesn't come even close to edging Google out of the number one slot tho...