Methods of Information

I've been thinking recently about digging out my copy of Pokemon Yellow and replaying it. I still have my GameBoy Color and the cartridge, though I'm not sure if it will still work - it has been a few years. I played from '99 to about '01, maybe '02. The reason I stopped was that my progress had come to a standstill. Specifically, I was stuck at Fuschia City because I couldn't find the HM for Surf. Turns out, it's way out in the far corner of the Safari Zone. The Gold Teeth, which you trade to get the HM for Strength is also way out there.

The Safari Zone is very, very large, and the land you must navigate has several dead ends, and routes that are apparently designed for the sole purpose of making you waste your time. That, coupled with the fact that you need almost all your steps to reach the far corner, means that repeated failure is nearly guaranteed unless you look it up online.

It's only in recent years that I've really taken to looking up walkthroughs online. Certainly, Youtube makes it much easier to explain how to proceed through a game. Rather than spend pages and pages describing every step in detail, you can just make a video showing what to do. And with the rise of wikis, sharing information has become ever easier.

I'm not sure when the wiki I use to look up Pokemon stuff first came up. It has complete maps of the different sections of the Safari Zone so I can now plot out a path. Youtube was first launched back in 2005, and I can (and did) look up a walkthrough in which someone demonstrates the routes needed to get the HM for Surf and the Gold Teeth, respectively. I would just like to say this right now, that it is very difficult to use something that does not currently exist!

(I'm going off on a tangent with this next part, but it's something that has been bugging me for a while now. There's this one scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home [the one where they have to go back in time and rescue whales], where Bones gets all snippy with the doctors of 1986, and the medical procedure they were going to perform. Oh, yeah Bones. What were they thinking? Obviously, they should be using a piece of equipment that won't even exist for another two centuries! I've been needing to get that out of my system for some time now.)

Things have changed since then. As I said, wikis have become more commonplace. Wikipedia itself didn't have that much of a part in my life, at least until high school. Of course, there it was because all the teachers flatly refused to let students use it at all. In college, the teachers eased up a little bit; we couldn't use it as a source, but we were allowed on it. That's reasonable. Scroll down to the bottom of a page and you'll find links to various sources, some of which will probably be okay to use as a source. You can't use Wikipedia itself as a source, but you can use it as a starting point!

Of course, wikis can be tricky things. Certainly recently, Wikipedia has really tightened the screws on who can add what. This is probably for the best, considering the circumstances. Wikipedia is online, which means that anyone with a modem has access to it. You let enough people have access to something, I guarantee it's only a matter of time before someone starts slipping in bad information, either as an act of sabotage or just for a laugh. Case in point, a few years ago, I overheard a conversation in which one guy recounted this one time that he and two of his friend added a blurb to some actor's Wikipedia page. I forget the exact wording, but it ran along the lines of that "he enjoys spending most evenings at Michael Jackson's Neverland". They just slipped this into the section where it was talking about movies that this actor was in. The blurb was up for three weeks before it got taken down.

So, sometimes stuff gets put up wrong, or unnecessary material gets put up. The alternative is also true - sometimes stuff gets left out. Yesterday I was perusing a wiki for an online card game, in the hopes of finding a card that could restore health to all cards on the field that I control. The wiki did list several cards; however, when I looked through the card listings within the game itself, I found three cards not mentioned on the wiki. I was put off by this, though I have since recovered.

Am I really that surprised by all this? No, not really. After all, the people contributing to these things are just that - people. Yes, there is the occasional jokester, but for the most part, it's just humans bringing forward bits of information, pooling their knowledge, and trying to make life a little easier for the group as a whole. Can I reasonably expect anything more than that? Not really, nor do I. And certainly, I'm in no position to judge.

After all, I'm just another human.