It’s all quite meta. From the Wikipedia: The Wikipedia

The Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and was originally intended only to complement the Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia of the more traditional form.

Articles to the site can be added and edited by any user, though certain controversial pages are limited to established users and site administrators.

The Wikipedia was available in 18 different languages by the end of 2001, 161 by the end of 2004 and is now available in 240 languages. The English-language edition has over two million entries, making it the largest encyclopedia ever compiled.

Needless to say, the Wikipedia’s Wikipedia page is rife with information about the Wikipedia. It includes criticisms of the Wikipedia and reports of various studies on the Wikipedia’s reliability.

I happen to think the Wikipedia is our greatest cultural achievement. How crazy is it to think that, when I was growing up, we had to take time out of our regular classes in school to go to the library and learn how to use reference materials? Do kids still have those sessions, or do they just learn how to search the Wikipedia, which takes about 10 seconds?

My parents had a Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia, and we relied on it for nearly everything, even though it was from the early 1980s and perpetually thought the Soviet Union remained intact and the Berlin Wall upright.

We don’t need any of those things anymore, because we have the Wikipedia. And sure, maybe there are some errors, but those real encyclopedias, it turned out, had some errors too. And they didn’t have millions of users policing them all the time and editing out the most egregious of the mistakes.

The Wikipedia does, and it’s pretty damn accurate. I figured this out when I asked a doctor about a prescription medication I was taking and he went to its Wikipedia page to find out more. My wife is in med school now, and everyone there apparently relies on the Wikipedia for everything. At the very least, it can point people to more “legitimate” sources in the citations.

I have an iPhone now, which means I have access to the Wikipedia almost always. This has been, without a doubt, the best part about having an iPhone, and probably the best thing about technology ever. Unless I’m in a subway tunnel, I can get whatever information I want whenever I want it. It’s crazy, and it’s part of the reason the Wikipedia is the best thing humans have created.

In a related story, I co-founded a Taco Bell wiki a while back, and it sits mostly unedited. Get on it, Internet.

Adam Rubin wrote today that the Mets hope to re-sign Alex Cora, a player who probably inspires five times as much debate around this office as anyone else.

This debate, I should mention, almost always features me.

So much was made about what Alex Cora brought to the Mets’ clubhouse this year, and I’m not going to argue otherwise. By all accounts, he’s a nice guy and a smart player and will make a great coach someday.

The problem is he’s not very good at baseball anymore.

Cora played much of 2009 with torn ligaments in his thumbs, which might excuse the .630 OPS he posted in over 300 plate appearances. The problem is, that line is not really that far off Cora’s career .658 mark, and unsurprising given the expected decline of a 33-year-old player.

Moreover, depending on which metric you prefer, Cora played somewhere between average and below-average defense at second base and shortstop. To the eye, he demonstrated a lack of range that likely affected the Mets’ groundball pitchers like Mike Pelfrey and Sean Green.

The co-worker with whom I usually engage in this debate argues that Cora’s deficiencies on the field are more than made up for by his additions to the clubhouse, and claims that to build a winning team, the Mets need more character guys like Alex Cora.

Far be it for me to say a team doesn’t need character guys, but if it does, it should be able to acquire ones who are above replacement-level. And Cora isn’t.

I like to believe that, on a good and successful ballclub, character guys will surface and in nearly any group dynamic, leaders will emerge. In other words, I don’t think a team should be in the business of acquiring leaders or clubhouse guys. I think the team should focus on acquiring the 25 best players it can to fill out its roster rather than building a team on what Theo Epstein might call “psychobabble.”

If Alex Cora could be had at the league minimum, then sure, why not? He could be a helpful guy to have around during Spring Training and if he could prove he merited a spot on the roster, great.

But Alex Cora will not be had at the league minimum, and that’s the problem. Cora cost the Mets $2 million last season, and the Mets — as Rubin points out — are operating with a finite budget.

Every time I post this criticism, someone jumps down my throat and argues that $2 million is a drop in the Mets’ payroll bucket and should not be the difference between signing a bigger-name free agent or not.

Maybe that’s so, but consistently dropping $2 million on players of Cora’s caliber, ones that could by definition be replaced by someone earning the league minimum, adds up. It does. I know we all want the Mets to be able to spend like the Yankees, but until they do, we need to root for them to spend more efficiently.

Finally, with Jose Reyes still something of a question mark moving forward, the Mets should have a backup plan in place that’s better than Alex Cora.

Certainly the best-case scenario for the club would have Reyes playing 150 games at shortstop like he did every year from 2005 to 2008. But though Reyes is supposedly on the mend, his injuries have beguiled the Mets before, and it would behoove the team to have a backup in house who could at least defend the position well, if not also hit a little bit.

If the Mets are so gung-ho on Cora returning to their clubhouse, there’s a bench coach position still waiting to be filled.

Unsurprisingly, conflicting reports abound about what the Mets may or may not do this offseason. Matt Cerrone wraps up a bunch of them, and I remain skeptical. I don’t think that the journalists reporting from anonymous sources are lying to us, I just think offseason outlooks probably change rapidly — as they should — as the market develops.

Plus, Joel Sherman reports “a split camp” in the Mets’ front office, so sources could be from one side or the other of the split and only leaking the information they want leaked. It’s always important to consider the source’s motivation, too.

I think that the Internet culture and 24-hour news cycle have made scooping and rumormongering so important to Web traffic that journalists essentially push out whatever they hear without really concerning themselves with viability. And until someone starts holding reporters responsible for the amount of nonsense they publish, they have no real impetus to stop.

Joe Janish at Mets Today wonders why everyone’s been so complacent about the news of Tim Lincecum’s marijuana-possession arrest. He remembers baseball’s drug problem in the 1980s and the way it tarnished the game’s image.

Times change, though — look at the difference in perception between Bill Clinton’s admission of marijuana use and Barack Obama’s admission of cocaine use. People just don’t seem to care as much. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s clearly a thing.

Dave Cameron at Fangraphs points out that Mike Cameron is probably a better pickup than Jason Bay. Of course, at least some of that is based on the fact that Cameron has added value because he plays center field (extremely well), so I wonder how much that would be diminished if he was signed as a left fielder, a non-premium defensive position.