Introduction to and Review of Free Internet Source Experiment

The following post is an experiment in free technology resources (primarily Wikipedia). My attempt at writing this post using only the sources was problematic for several reasons. First, it is almost impossible to make a viable historical argument using largely factual sources. If there was an archive of letters written by people throughout the years on Valentine's Day to their significant others published online, perhaps some original work could have been accomplished. Perhaps a psychological history could be attempted about how holidays live Valentine's Day affect people in times of war, or how war affects the celebration of Valentine's Day.

Second, if a creative topic is struck upon, it is almost impossible not to plagiarize from a source like Wikipedia. All it does is offer facts. And so one finds themselves using these facts in their own work, because that's all there really is to go on. There is no hope of making side assumptions from the work in Wikipedia because all the assumptions are already made. In the end, the best that can be hoped for is to synthesize the material from Wikipedia in a way that makes it unique or to at least attempt to reword it.

Finally, essays written from free internet sources lack the personality of true research projects once again because of the trivial nature of the articles. It is hard to become passionate about a work in which one is simply synthesizing thoroughly researched material. Certainly Valentine's Day has the potential to be an interesting subject, and one can learn quite a bit about it from Wikipedia, but because the information gained will never become a part of their original research in a significant way it cannot be written about with the same personality and with the same drive to force an argument home.