How I spent the afternoon in my cubicle

So today, I went to search something on Google, and I stumbled upon tviv.org for the first time ever. It's basically another wiki site that's purely made for TV-related info. According to the homepage, it launched over a year ago on 27 July 2005, and as of this afternoon, there are 105,268 articles (versus 1.3 million general articles on Wikipedia since 2001).

At first, I was confused (and frankly kind of angry). What is the purpose of this site? Why does it need to exist when the granddaddy of all wiki sites is so deservedly well-known? If you search a show on TV IV, you'll see that most of the articles are in extremely primitive stages and only exist for fairly recent and more popular shows (Family Guy, Lost, etc.). For example, there isn't anything yet for All in the Family or Pacific Palisades or Charles in Charge (just to name a few).

BUT there are actually some TV IV articles that almost surpass the quality of their Wikipedia counterparts! For instance, when I searched Charles in Charge, the second article to pop up in my search was Desmond Hume (no idea why), a character on Lost. Surprisingly, it was pretty extensive, so I checked it against the version on Wikipedia. The TV IV article includes a much more extensive section on Desmond's similarities to Odysseus as well as a link to Kelvin Inman (the guy who was in the hatch before Desmond and recruited Sayid as an interrogator... the entry is pretty extensive considering he's only appeared in two Lost episodes) whereas Wikipedia doesn't even have an entry for Kelvin! What the hell!

(Okay, I realize that due to the nature of wiki, linking all these entries is pretty futile. But this is all true as of this afternoon.)

So what's really the issue here? The issue is that there are good people like me in this world who are trying really hard to get some quality work done in the office. And we cannot do this when all these time-sucking sites keep popping up... and then come their cheap imitators that look pretty dumb but have a certain edge that make us go to their sites anyway. Like Friendster (which, in my defense, I have never visited). Then Facebook came along which, according to my friends who were addicted to Friendster, was a cheap imitation but had the seductive angle of academic elitism (which has since been completely obliterated by the pitiful cries of public university students, but that's another story), so people flocked there. First, the extremely reliable People, then its snarky Manhattanite cousin Gawker (and later their creepy uncle Gawker Stalker). Also, you've got the wide variety of functions on AIM (very early-2000's College Student) versus the low-key simplicity of chatting on Gmail (extremely NOW Post-Grad Cube Monkey). And now, this TV IV business... and their entries for even D-list actors on current shows have really large headshots of very good quality which you would be hard pressed to find on Wikipedia!

Stop this madness! :-( Stop it, I say! I'm trying to get some freakin' work done... AND I CANNOT! Now I'm going to spend a ton of time looking up various TV shows to compare pages and edit all the content to match up in quality! Especially since the only Wikipedia pages that I ever edit are the ones related to TV (and movies... I have diverse interests).

Very annoying.

(Anyway, Lucy's probably the only one who cares... or even made it to the end of this entry... or even reads this blog at all... so thanks, Lucy. I appreciate it.)