Donation to the Wikimedia Foundation Item 19 - Donate to 30 29 charitie/non-profits

For my first donation on this blog I figured I'd go with a well known one. My purpose with making these donations in such a public way is not to pat myself on the back but more to put the idea out in the world and hopefully inspire someone else to donate as well. Thus, while I'm still getting my footing I figured it would be best to go with one that is already well known and to whom I can't do any harm with my shitty writing.

I use Wikipedia on a daily basis. I think a good majority of people in the United States do. Usually it's to prove that I'm right about some insane piece of trivia that nobody really cares about ("I told you the Black Panther first appeared in Fantastic Four! In your face!"), but it's also one of the best ways to find primary sources for things that you might actually care about. If I'd had Wikipedia when I was in high school I would have breezed through every research paper in no time.

We've all heard the (frankly somewhat asinine) arguments about how you can't be sure if what you are reading isn't information that has been inserted as a prank or un-sourced, but the same is true for a good deal of traditional academic work. The sheer number of edits keeping things honest gives a much better case for peer review than many academic papers, in some ways (at the very least, better than one by Andrew Wakefield). And hopefully the money that we donate now can foster greater technology to improve accuracy even more.

Donate here if you haven't already.