phil ringnalda

Like a great many other people apparently did, I read yesterday’s Post-Standard column or article (it’s not quite clear which) reporting that a high school librarian thinks that Wikipedia is a textbook example of an untrustworthy source. Me, I shrugged, thought for the millionth time what a shame it is that so many people see things in only black or white, and went on.

Morbus Iff instead fired off an email to the WEB4LIB list, blogged it, and cc’ed the author of the article. All in a day’s work, until things got interesting. The author of the article, who apparently also has an alter ego as Dr. Gizmo, dispenser of not-so-good technology advice (Doc: you use a hosts file to block inline ads, like the ones I assume would be blinking and flashing at me from those blank spots in your employer’s site if I didn’t have them blocked, not to block popups), took some umbrage at being addressed by someone with the unlikely name Morbus Iff. Me, I would have just googled it, but apparently that’s not his style. Now, he plans on writing on anonymity and civility (one presumes not as “Dr. Gizmo”), starting from the thesis

If opinions have any importance, they have them only in the context of who we are and what we stand for.

That has the potential to be amusing, though it strikes me as unlikely to be successful. Shame the Post-Standard doesn’t seem to have an RSS feed: this is the first time in a very long while that I’ve actually wanted to keep track of a newspaper’s website.