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I attended one of the events during Open Access Week about the future of libraries and Wikipedia. Jake Orlowitz, recipient of a Wikimedia Foundation Individual Engagement Grant, spoke about "The Wikipedia Library." The Wikipedia Library was a new project he founded in 2012 for the goal of connecting Wikipedia editors with the reliable information sources they need. In the first part of his presentation, he discussed much of what wikipedia is and how it is run. He basically summed up much of what most people don't know about wikipedia and a lot of assumptions that people make about how unreliable information on wikipedia is. Then he went on to discuss more about the wikipedia library and how it would benefit wikipedia editors with vital current reliable sources that they need to do their work. I thought the presentation given by the presenter was very informative and interesting. I learned more about wikipedia and how its more useful than I thought. The most interesting point he raised during his presentation were the benefits of the Wikipedia Library. The thought of connecting university libraries with the wikipedia library will present students and many others information that is reliable and easy to access. Many scholarly articles and information from databases we usually have to pay for will be available for universities to provide students at a much lower cost.

Thanks, Rebecca. I'll add 5 points to your Exam 2 grade.

The idea of open access to scholarly journals seems to be a big debate and this article talks about how publishers make millions of dollars off of research and peer reviews that are done for free. It also talks about Aaron Swartz who led the movement for allowing access to journals by basically "stealing" them and sharing them.

I'm pretty sure GMU subscribes to Office 365, which means that you can get Microsoft Office products for free while you're enrolled here. Quite a deal. Or you could use OpenOffice, the open source alternative.

I just checked up on this. The FAQ for GMU's Office 365 says the subscription only includes free access to the new Outlook and Calendar. I use OpenOffice on my computer, and apart from some formatting inconsistencies when working with people using Microsoft Office, it works great.

Fascinating article on grassroots alternatives to paying a company like Verizon for Internet access. If enough of these community-built networks come into being and link to each other, we'll have a brand-new Internet!

Oddly enough, today the Washington Post has chosen to reprint a 1988 article about the Internet; that article mentions Robert Tappan Morris, the first person prosecuted under the Computer Fraud Act, whom Brittney Douress told us about today. Nice timing, Brittney! :)

Note too that this article came out well before the World Wide Web was invented circa 1992 / 1993. There weren't any GUI web browsers yet; people just used text-only terminals (no pictures, no video) to access stuff. Mostly news groups -- I'll post a picture of what that looked like if I can find one.