My husband told me a shocking story last night!! He and his colleagues were debating whether America’s favorite ice cream topping is called “jimmies” or “sprinkles.” One of his colleagues (and I should mention that they’re all early thirties and under) said, we’ll check Wikipedia after lunch. My husband responded, we can’t trust that, people will edit the article to meet their opinion. His colleague was shocked. He asked what my husband meant only to learn that anyone can edit pages in Wikipedia. After lunch my husband showed his colleague how to edit the page on “sprinkles” in Wikipedia.
Most articles (or blog posts) I read usually assume that people know that Wikipedia is a wiki and a wiki is a page that anyone can edit – but somehow that fact has still escaped some of our patrons. How do we educate people like this? Of course they were just looking up something for fun – but what if it was something more important??
I mention this because Wikipedia has been in the news (again) lately. Today I got this article from the New York Times pointed out to me and a earlier I got this one.
Technorati Tags: wikipedia
And you’re just going to leave us in the dark about the whole “sprinkles vs. jimmies” debate? Librarians! They won’t just tell you the answer, they wanna make you go look for it…
LOL – Owen, I personally think it’s a matter of where you grew up. I called them “sprinkles” and grew up in northern New Jersey, but when we moved to southern New Jersey they were called “jimmies” – who knows what the right answer is!!
OK, “Computer Geeks” Mom speaking again….
Congratulations to my daughter (brillant as always).
By googling (learned this from her), I found the concrete answer!! ENJOY…..
Now – I must add a note to my mother’s comment – I did teach her how to use search engines – but I also tell her to check with libraries and librarians in addition to Google – don’t go giving me a bad name among librarians
hehe
We need a new map: http://www.popvssoda.com
Owen, that is so cool
Found your blog when looking for info about dustjackets. Just a quick thing-first Jimmies have a racist connotation—Jimmie comes from Jim Crow, as in the Jim Crow laws. That being said in Massachusetts my home state it’s jimmies not sprinkles.
You know, that’s a really good point. I think I usually assume that everyone knows Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. It’s in the news enough, right? Common knowledge.
But now that I think about it, I seem to spend a lot of time explaining to folks what a wiki is… And if people don’t know that, then knowing that it’s editable by anyone isn’t necessarily something they’d know. It’s good to challenge those simple assumptions sometimes.
BTW, it’s totally “sprinkles.”
Check this out:
CAS decides to work with the Wikipedia community to improve their use of CAS Registry Numbers:
http://www.cas.org/newsevents/caswikipedia.html
I grew up outside of Philly and had only ever heard of jimmies until after undergrad when I tried to order jimmies in Los Angeles and got a blank stare. I didn’t even know to call them sprinkles, I had to point. Now when I go home I pick up a bag of jimmies from the pre-packaged bulk section of my local supermarket just to show people who have never heard the word jimmies.