I just enjoyed watching the first-round Finland-Canada hockey game from Sochi; the Finnish defense is awesome, and Tuukka Rask just about beat Canada single-handed. Also, they gotta do something about the ice quality. But this isn’t about that, it’s about Wikipedia, once again beating the world.
After the game was over, CBC TV showed a helpful grid of the rest of the tournament and how the playoffs worked. It went by a little too fast so I went to pull it up on the Internet. The Sochi14 site is horribly organized, but eventually, after much thrashing around, I tracked down the hockey playoff page, but nobody had bothered to fill it in. CBC sports? Couldn’t find it (even though they had it on screen). NBC sports? Couldn’t find it. SB Nation? Nope. At this point I was starting to get seriously irritated.
Hey wait, how about Wikipedia... yep, there it is, easy to find, easy to read, all filled in 15 minutes after that last pool game finished.
I’m not diving into What It All Means; but it sure is indicative that once again, a crowdsourced volunteer effort just finished spanking a bunch of the world’s best-funded and allegedly most professional publishing organizations.
And argh... the final is on at 4AM, Pacific time. Since Olympic hockey is one of the world’s few sports events that wholly engages me and even makes me a partisan, I guess I’ll be getting up to watch it if Canada gets past the US to make it in, probably against either Russia or Sweden.
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Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Matěj Cepl (Feb 16 2014, at 23:09)
“Canada gets past the US” … where do you find the assurance you will ever meet US? You meant “when Canada will be beaten by the Czechia”, right? ;)
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From: Eric H (Feb 17 2014, at 19:51)
A while ago I realized that, whenever I'm looking for information that is probably on Wikipedia, I'll go there first. For example: if I'm wondering "what products does company X make" or "how long has company Y been in business", I know that Wikipedia is likely to have that information in a simple, sensible format, whereas the actual company's site is unlikely to have it at all, and if it does, is likely to have it behind ten layers of useless Flash and other BS.
So for me, it's not just that Wikipedia _has_ the information; it's that their consistent, non-nonsense interface is vastly more usable.
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From: Doug K (Feb 18 2014, at 11:59)
I had the same experience with rugby World Cup. As Eric H notes, the official site was obfuscated by video and reams of Javascript apparently bought by the yard, nearly impenetrable. It's both the crowd-sourcing and the simple text interface, that give W the win..
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