An eventful day

I’ve mentioned it plenty of times, but I am a huge history buff. It’s one of the reasons I’m sure to include “This Day in History” in every paper, so I hope everyone enjoys reading it.

Just a little spoiler alert from Page 7, assuming you read the paper in order, page by page, there was a lot of cool stuff that happened on this particular day over the years, including the crowning of England's Queen Elizabeth I back in 1559. You’ve also got the founding of the University of Notre Dame in 1844 (those Irish have been Fighting for a long time), the first use of the donkey to symbolize the Democratic Party back in 1870 (not the mascot I would have chosen, but it was originally meant to be derisive… maybe it still is.

What else? Well, the first-ever Super Bowl was today in 1967, and from my lifetime, in 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s national holiday.

Those are all cool, but the one that really caught my eye is one that really probably affects all of us more directly than any other item on that list. Twenty years ago today, the web site Wikipedia was launched. First of all… 2001 was twenty years ago?!? I’m so old. Second of all, when it first started, just about every educator in the world scoffed at it as being unreliable. Nowadays, it’s probably the most trusted (or at least the most used) source of information on the internet.

Remember encyclopedias? Now you’ve got a fully updateable encyclopedia of everything in the universe right in your pocket. I assume by 2041, we’ll all just have Wikipedia implanted in our brains.