A friend of mine on Twitter said that he remembers when the MIME format for email attachments was competing with the UUencode format for email attachments -- kind of like VHS versus Betamax. Here's the Wikipedia article on the format that lost.

We heard from Mahrokh the other day about Snowden's email provider Lavabit shutting down -- turns out they've come back with a program called "Dark Mail." By the way, did you know that the email state employees (such as faculty like me who work at state-funded universities like GMU) are all technically public records? As long as the email isn't covered by student privacy acts like FERPA, anyone can request to see my GMU email because it's a public record. Technically.

Personally I don't think I've ever looked up a health topic on Wikipedia; I use WebMD for that. Which isn't crowdsourced, I don't think -- I think they pay people to write the content on WebMD. Still, nice idea to offer college credit!

A blog post (nearly a scholarly article) on common errors made by Optical Character Recognition, including the error of thinking that the medial S is an f.

A book about the history of microfilming newspapers after World War Two. Baker then set up his own newspaper repository, which he donated to Duke Libraries in 2004.

Yes and no, Michael. What you've linked to is a page at the National Archives, which stores government documents. Most of the databases on that page can only be used if you're actually at the National Archives (or are logged in remotely to its network). But GMU subscribes to most of those databases, too. The main building for the National Archives (aka NARA for National Archives and Records Administration) is downtown on the National Mall -- it's worth a visit.

Also, please post these as Bookmarks, not Topics! That way it's easier for us to click on the link you've shared: http://www.archives.gov/research/alic/tools/online-databases.html

Whoa! Fascinating, Taylor. Amazing how people (me included) feel about the sacredness of books. Great story.

But please do post these as Bookmarks, not Topics. :)

Picture of an old card catalog.

An image of an old card catalog card with the bibliographic metadata included, including the call number.

A more recent article (from 2011) reporting the results of a study showing that Wikipedia is indeed usually accurate. The author writes: "In this article, I review thousands of Wikipedia articles about candidates, elections, and officeholders to assess both the accuracy and the thoroughness of Wikipedia's coverage. I find that Wikipedia is almost always accurate when a relevant article exists, but errors of omissionare extremely frequent. These errors of omission follow a predictable pattern. Wikipedia's political coverage is often very good for recent or prominent topics but is lacking on older or more obscure topics."

This is the automatic tool that uncovered and erased Jonathan's test edit and probably Erin's too -- it's called STiki. It's not actually all the way automatic, though -- the page says "STiki is not a Wikipedia bot: it is an intelligent routing tool that directs human users to potential vandalism for definitive classification." So basically someone somewhere was probably spending some time looking through possible vandalism edits and decided not to keep some of the ones our class submitted.

Note that it took 13 minutes for Jonathan's malicious misinformation about Gumby to go away. Not too shabby.

Here's a tremendously engaging video of Clay Shirky giving the talk I just linked to about where people find the time to edit Wikipedia -- he thinks they probably stop watching TV. Which do you think is more productive? Another great quote from this piece: "So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought. And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television."

In response to the person who said in class that people who edit Wikipedia "have a lot of time on their hands" -- see this 2008 piece by Very Smart Guy and NYU professor Clay Shirky, who points out that editing Wikipedia is a more productive use of time than watching TV. Which, somehow, a lot of people also seem to have a lot of time to do. *** "I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?" I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system." So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years.""

The Wikipedia page on Wikipedians - demographics, proportions, and the rest.

A 2011 article about the "gender gap" in Wikipedia editing, which still persists today, although Wikipedia has undertaken to address it.

If you want to gain strong reputation points in the Wikipedia community and therefore gain more privileges, here's how -- this is a tutorial from Wired magazine.

A terrific video that describes, visually, how Wikipedia works.

A friend of mine just shared that on Twitter, too, Jonathan. Google does many, many things ... this one seems weird.