Archive:Stories: Difference between revisions

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+{{cquote|Wikipedia has been my constant friend through college and until today.  Purely academic research is rare in my country, the Philippines, and the research materials even more uncommon.  While one cannot fault a lack of focus on science (as my country is relatively poor), one can protest against the difficulty of acquiring information that could very well lead to changes to our world.
+There was not a week that I did not check something on Wikipedia.  Always handy, and presented in a format that makes it easy to glean information for quick reference, yet with the potential for much more extensive presentation, I favored Wikipedia for all my questions -- academic and otherwise.
+As a person with varied interests and a mind that tends to cling to curiosities, Wikipedia is at the very least a double blessing for me.  I could quite literally be hampered in my work if a strong question comes to mind.  Better to look it up quickly and be done with it than to suffer curiosity's prodding or even -- at times -- piercing claws.
+The greatest help I ever got from Wikipedia was when I was writing my undergraduate thesis.  I was the lead proponent in a study on the aspects and development of a Machine Translation system for Ilocano (a Philippine language) and English.  There were, quite literally, no available sources for Ilocano linguistics in the context of Natural Language Processing.  The only related materials available were dictionaries for Ilocano and English. Neither were there books dealing with the core of NLP.  In the end, Wikipedia was what helped us make it through the undertaking, and now our study has become the foundation for further NLP studies in our university.
+Going beyond how it was useful (and still proves to be, to this day), Wikipedia is an ideal.  It is the actualization of a concept that transcends geopolitical boundaries and human strife.  It is a leading means of sharing and retrieving information, regardless of one's location, identity, or other traits.}}
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 {{cquote|What can I say? Wikipedia means hope, integrity, sanity, everything to me. It's that simple.