Tuesday 22 December 2009

Wiki...

About five years ago, I used to be one of the editors for Wikipedia's Middle-earth Portal. I subsequently stopped doing it because I often re-read articles only to discover that my edits were changed back to what they were before. One of the drawbacks of a commercial and ''user-friendly'' encyclopedia I guess. As such, I seldom use Wikipedia. Amusingly, one of my Biblical Studies lecturers, in her rather long admonition against using Wikipedia, told us that when marking students' essays, she would always turn to Wikipedia if the style of their composition suddenly changed and would 9 times out of 10 discover a near verbatim quote!

I say I seldom use Wikipedia, but I do sometimes. I also sometimes read the Tolkien stuff, if only to laugh at the appallingly bad and certainly unTolkien-like syntax, grammar, errors, want of sources and information. I looked up Laurelindórenan this afternoon, one of my favourite Tolkien words, and was amused to read that two of the ''legacies'' of Lothlórien are that a ''neopagan'' retreat has been established in Indiana named after the Golden Wood and an all-vegetarian house and cooperative affiliated with the BSC in California. Heaven and Earth! What would Tolkien say!?

Read the article here.

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