Starvin’ Marvin

I found out a really interesting article on Ars Technica about some schools banning Wikipedia as a source for student’s assignments. I’ve also found out some places were puting in practice some more aggressive measures to avoid wikipedia: bans on campus computers, stickers saying “Just say no to wikipedia”, etc. The argument is that wikipedia is not accurate enough for citations in school work. Well, I might agree with that in some cases and I generally believe that wikipedia is a very good starting point when you’re starting to study a certain subject, not the absolute reference about everything. In fact, the concept is similar to a encyclopedia (that, as wikipedia, generally you don’t use as citation in your school work, right?) and, as far as I know encyclopedias don’t get banned at schools!

So, where it goes my understanding about this subject: please, don’t make wikipedia your worst enemy, because it is your best friend. Learn from it, and when you study some subject deeply take some minutes and correct what you found wrong or inaccurate there. This way, you will be improving the overall quality of wikipedia. Hopefully, others will do the same and probably you’ll benefit from this on other subjects.

I was installing Firefox on one of my machines and I realized how nice plug-ins are. So I decided to compile in a post some must have plugins that you I need to install every I do a fresh Firefox install:

• Foxmarks - By far the best way to have your bookmarks synced and saved in the network
• DownloadThemAll - Well, one of the things I hate in Firefox is the Download Manager. DownloadThemAll is a pretty good Download Manager and provides me all the features I need: fast downloads, HTTP multiple gets, one click downloads, etc.
• Scrapbook - Found something interesting, but no time to read it now? Thanks to a friend of mine I found a easy way to save parts of webpages to enjoy later on. You may think this is not very useful, but it really improves your online efficiency.
• Foxtrick - Do you play hattrick? If the answer is yes, then you know why you need it.

I could state more, but these ones are the ones I consider essential. Do you have any other suggestions? Fell free to suggest some.

Edit (28/11/2007): I added one plug-in that I have forgotten. One that it is really simple and really helpful: QuickProxy. The name says it all, just a simple icon in the status bar for quick switch between no proxy and  proxy enabled.