Today, Wednesday, January 18th, is a dark day. Literally. Wikipedia has blacked itself out for twenty-four hours in a protest against two anti-piracy bills currently under consideration in Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect I.P. Act, that opponents believe pose a serious threat to the Internet. (Wikipedia isn’t the only site doing this—about seven thousand have reportedly joined the protest in one way or another, including giants like Google, which has blacked out the logo on its home page.)
So today we’re bringing you a very special edition of the To-Do List, one that’s all about temporary alternatives to Wikipedia. These might not be the options you’d imagine. It’s my personal belief that Wikipedia is best used—and probably most often used—not as a traditional encyclopedia, but in more creative ways, like settling bar bets and losing yourself in a downward spiral of hyperlinks, tracing your way from one entry to another until you realize you’ve happily wasted hours learning things you’ll never think about again. As a public service, we’ve decided to step in and ensure that you have a list of sites that will fill that role and keep you from having to actually do your job. And don’t worry—Wikipedia’s back tomorrow.
The archives of the New York Times: You may have to pay for some of the articles on the paper’s site, which date as far back as 1851, but it’s worth it. The big news stories are interesting, of course, but it’s the small things—the chronicles of everyday life in the city—that are really fascinating. People with deep roots in New York may be in for some unexpected glimpses into their own history. (A personal example: if you do some digging into the December 26, 1910 edition of the paper, you may find a small item on the wedding of my great-grandparents, who’d met not long before when they were lawyers arguing opposite sides of a civil case. This may explain their split some years later.)
YouTube: The clips on the video-sharing site are largely short, but the time spent watching them adds up very quickly. A couple suggestions: follow Ian Crouch’s example and come up with your own personal list of sports-therapy videos by looking at some of the old highlights of your favorite teams that are sure to be on the site, or just trace the path of songs about reference and reference books that Ben Greenman has already laid out for you.
DigitalVaults.org: A Web site run by the National Archives, Digital Vaults is designed to make it easy to get lost in a stream of data. Clicking one of the documents it randomly gives you upon entry takes you to a page full of related information, and on and on. You may not have known you were interested in reading a letter about the urgent need for ice for wounded soldiers in the Civil War, but you’ll be reading it anyway soon enough.
IMDB: Limited to movies and television, of course, but you can use it in the same way you would Wikipedia. Because you really need to know, right now, why you recognize that guy who plays the landlord in “Coming to America.”
Animals Talking in All Caps: A Tumblr blog with pictures of cute animals and captions in which they say funny things. ’Nuff said.
Wikipedia: Truth is, you can still access it with the help of a couple workarounds--or working knowledge of a language other than English. Don’t tell anyone.
