Wikipedia

A couple of weeks ago, my son had to make a presentation for school on a French city of his choice. He chose Le Havre as we've been there before and it's not as obvious as Paris. I helped him a bit finding the right information and Wikipedia turned out to be his best source of information. I wasn't really all that suprised because I find myself more and more often consulting Wikipedia, also on mainframe topics. I used to be a little sceptic about it as anyone can contribute to Wikipedia and you're never sure whether it's trustworthy. Still, Wikipedia has proven to be a good starting point when you're looking for decent information. Some examples ?

There's an entry on CICS. And we can immediately indicate why the information is usually quite to the point. I use this CICS page as example : there are always three additional tabs : if you want to check whether the information is up to date, you can check the history page. If you do not agree with some of the statements or if you think some of them need clarification, you can turn to the discussion page. And if you are a real expert on the subject, you can always edit the article yourself. And I think this auto-correcting character of Wikipedia (in most cases) just works fine.

You can also find spin-offs of some subjects with a wiki entirely dedicated to one subject. Again I can take CICS as an example. as there's a separate CICS Wiki. This "wiki is dedicated to act as a living knowledge base for CICS and CICS related products".

And of course there's also a System z9 page. But there's more. Here you can see that Wikipedia is really kept up to date. There's already a topic on a Future Machine. A couple of months ago there was quite a lot of talk about a new mainframe processor, called z6, that was announced by IBM. Well, this article already has a link to the presentation of this 4+Ghz processor. No, this is not a christmas gift by IBM. As the article states "As of November, 2007, IBM had not yet shipped a machine using this new design". And, for the time being, this hasn't changed yet.