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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.""

An article from Technology Review discusses an important question many people bring up about the quality of articles on wikipedia. It also discusses the relatively small number of dedicated editors who play a fundamental role in the community. Due to the small number of editors and authoritative contributors to many of the articles on Wikipedia, the article also discusses that an algorithm that assesses the quality of Wikipedia articles could reassure visitors and help focus editors on entries that need improving. The computer scientists (Xiangju Qin and Pádraig Cunningham) have developed automated editorial tool that may reduce the workload that remains for the volunteer workforce.

The Wikipedia guy who came to speak told me about this article -- it's a big deal in the Wikipedia community.

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.

This article describes the benefits of search engine alternatives to the mighty Google. In doing so, it also reveals how much information Google keeps on you every time you do a search. 

after reading this article my first thought was "Awesome, new sites I can Google on!"

Listserve is a website that writes about lists of things strange and yet fascinating at the same time. This list definetly falls under this idea, and despite the fact that this article was originally published in 2011, most of the articles in this list are still up and running on wikipedia.

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."

An article about a recent incident in China where a group of people were found to be selling fake scholarly articles to academics and producing fake medical journals for sale.

What does "High Speed Internet" mean exactly? This article gives you detailed information about the speed of the internet we use everyday and what speed would be the right choice for ourselves. According to the article, "80 percent of broadband users in the United States don't know don't know what speed they are paying for". If you were one of those, you would probably want to go click "Alternative Broadband Speed Test" on the second page of the article and check yours today!

This article explains the difference between the internet and the WWW by describing the internet as a network of computers and the WWW as one of the modes we use to access certain files within this network. It also states that-- as we had discussed in class-- though the WWW is probably the most widely-used mode of accessing the internet, other ways, such as through email and instant messaging, are also available.

This article explains the difference between the internet and the WWW by describing the internet as a network of computers and the WWW as one of the modes we use to access certain files within this network. It also states that-- as we had discussed in class-- though the WWW is probably the most widely-used mode of accessing the internet, other ways, such as through email and instant messaging, are also available.

Which is better, OSS or Proprietary Software? This article poses both sides of the arguments, mainly that OSS is lauded for it's "community" support, while Proprietary Software is backed by professional, tried and true support. The main conclusions were that OSS and Proprietary Software essentially match in content quality until the codes become longer. In that case, Proprietary Software comes out on top.

Good article, Casey, thanks!

This article discusses a power struggle between David Karp and the new CEO of Tumblr.

From the library of The City University of New York on the importance of peer review, features of a peer-reviewed article, and how to find peer-reviewed articles.

Don't forget to add a comment that describes what's at the link, Milan. I'll give you credit this time, but not next time. That is clearly an *ancient* web page. If you do View Source on it, too, you can tell (at least I can) that it was hand-coded in HTML rather than generated by a CMS. And all the tags are written in capital letters, . No one does that anymore.

Plus, crews.org is a middle school. I don't really trust what they say about the Internet. :) Of course, if it's "just for fun" ...

ICANN was offering the chance to buy the top-level domain of a Web address. One woman paid $185,000 to own the domain .wed. Now over 1,900 new Web names are going to be introduced.

Great article, Laura, and nice summary of it. Thanks!

In this Time Magazine article, Claire Suddath interviews Greg Kot, who is a music critic for the Chicago Tribune. He gives his argument that the internet is a positive for music and the music industry. He has also written a book about the topic.

This is a slide show about the differences between Apple computers and computers that are deemed "PCs". It compares everything from design to software. I thought it was interesting to see how people see these computers and what the actual difference between them were.

I see that both you and Marion have shared links from HowStuffWorks.com -- that site usually has pretty good information, especially for basic stuff. I find it interesting that they're classified as an "entertainment" site; they pay people a little (not much) to write the articles, and then they sell ads on the content. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_stuff_works I know a guy who works there -- Jonathan Strickland. Great guy and great podcaster.

Interesting, Taylor, although I wish that article had a date on it. I bet it's a couple of years old: both Macs and PCs change a lot. Still, those differences still apply. Technically, of course, Macs are PCs, since PC stands for "Personal Computer," which a Mac is. But what can you do -- language is slippery.

In addition to the content management systems we talked about today like wordpress, there are plenty of other great content management systems out there for people to use.

Although that article was written way back in 2009, I'd say it's still pretty accurate. All the CMSes I know of are in that list, plus some I hadn't heard of.

Fascinating article from the Wall Street Journal on Google and how they are handling China's censorship laws.

This article discusses how US telephone companies (Verizon, AT&T, etc) constantly send phone records to the government without questioning their motives.

That term "metadata" (data about data!) is more interesting than you might think, and this article shows why ...

Here's the discussion page about that misleading Wikipedia article about DuckDuckGo, if you're interested.