Know Your Internet

Top News Page

en.wikinews.org

Tired of the political bias of Fox News and CNN? Try WikiNews to get the most important stories of the day and not 17 stories about a possible sighting of Madeline McCann. Since the site is written and edited by users, you get every news topic you can think of. Sports, politics, entertainment (to some extent, as you won’t find celebrity gossip) - it is all there.



Top Dictionary/Thesaurus

en.wiktionary.org

Websites like dictionary.com and m-w.com are hard to navigate and full of annoying ads. Wikionary is pure information. Since it is user written and edited, you will often get definitions and synonyms you can actually understand - unlike the big sites, which are written for old men and high scholars. It also gives more information such as Translations, Rhymes and Derived Terms.



Top Everything Directory

en.wikipedia.org

Having trouble figuring out if your pet Chinchilla is a C. brevicaudata or a C. lanigera? Check out this Wiki page and you’ll soon realize that the C. brevicaudata has “a shorter tail, a thicker neck and shoulders, and shorter ears.” It is also near extinction, so you probably don’t have one. More and more professors are accepting Wikipedia as a trusted source, because of the heavy moderation and hard-ass super users. In addition, it is fun to check a topic’s history and search for recent vandalism... but that’s not cool so don’t do it.