Use Wikipedia to Brush Up on Business Prospects

I love Wikipedia, the Online Open Source Encyclopedia:

Whenever you are stumped about almost anything, go to www.Wikipedia.org and enter several key words and get your answer in seconds.

I suspect that when a TV game show host calls a fan at home with some contest question to answer in 30 seconds, that fan is frantically typing the subject of the question into Wikipedia for a quick answer within the allotted time.

Wikipedia is also great for that troublesome moment when neither you nor your spouse can remember who played the acting role of, say, Steven Seagal's gutsy female partner in his movie, Above the Law.

The trivia feature alone of Wikipedia may cut short many nighttime movie arguments as it does with me and my real estate broker wife, Debbie Ferrari, in my home.

Wikipedia says that it "is written collaboratively by volunteers from all around the
world. With rare exceptions, its articles can be edited by anyone with access
to the Internet, simply by clicking the Edit This Page link." Of course
all entries are then reviewed by very sage editors.

Now you might think that such a setup invites errors and failure, but not so. Wikipedia has so many editors that it becomes self-correcting and makes no grandiose claims for itself as it says in its own "Criticism of Wikipedia"
page: "Wikipedia acknowledges that it should not be used as a primary
source for serious research."

But unless you are building a rocket ship or a skyscraper, you do not need
300 percent state-of-the-art accuracy. You just might need to send a fairly
intelligent answer to a guy down the street who asked you what you know about wood drying in a flood-ravaged home, or soil compaction under a new Phoenix suburb's housing tract.

For that matter, many authorities believe Wikipedia is extremely accurate. Among many supporters of Wikipedia, Discover Magazine noted that "…science entries in Wikipedia, the open-source online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, are nearly as error-free as those in Encyclopædia Britannica, according to a team of expert reviewers."

Say you have a business breeding horses and a horse buyer is coming to visit you from afar, and he said when he called you that he was a securities analyst
and you know virtually nothing about that field. Now wouldn't it make sense to
learn a bit about him by learning more about his profession? Wouldn't knowing
his field enable you to ask him better questions as you are getting to know each other -- often a prelude to building trust in you that could lead to a sale?

Or what about when you are in a transaction to buy a home, and the seller and his agent are feeding you something perhaps not true about the seller's water heater and his responsibility for repairing it? You can get insight into their claim and related facts by looking up "water heating" on Wikipedia.

Yes, Wikipedia even covers mundane things like that in the home, including:
dishwashers, refrigerators, garage doors, and problems such as mold
and mold remediation, seismic retrofit, and window replacement. Now you can talk intelligently about almost any home-related subject that any contractor or appliance seller, who tries talking above your head, brings up!

Wikipedia also covers most realty terms, including the more sensitive or arcane ones such as charitable remainder trust, 1031 property exchange and most everything you'd ever want to know about the more arcane aspects of the real estate field itself.

Wikipedia can save you huge amounts of time over a year, and  make you suddenly seem smarter to your friends, relatives, and clients. Wikipedia even has
special apps for looking up stuff on your smart phone or smart pad, something to amuse yourself with while a passenger on a long drive.

How big is Wikipedia? Here’s how it defines its scope: “Wikipedia is a free,
collaborative, multilingual Internet encyclopedia supported by the non-profit
Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles (over 3.8 million in English
alone) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost
all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site, and it has
about 100,000 regularly active contributors. As of January 2012, there are
editions of Wikipedia in 283 languages. It has become the largest and most
popular general reference work on the Internet, ranking sixth globally, among
all websites on Alexa and having an estimated 365 million readers worldwide. It
is estimated that Wikipedia receives 2.7 billion monthly page views from the
United States alone.” (You’d do well to make a donation to help keep Wikipedia available forever to both students and adults.)

Don't wait. Go download the downloadable and check out the checkable right now,
before you forget and lose the place where your computer found this column. Remember this free info source on most any subject is at www.Wikipedia.org.

(c) Bill Koelzer, Internet Marketing and PR Consultant to Businesses