HIST 390-001 The Digital Past Fall 2013

Do you like privacy? Do you shun surveillance and eschew spam? Do you like simplicity? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you'll love DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is the brainchild of everyday American Gabriel Weinberg, and until news of the National Security Agency's widespread spying program broke last month, it was a baby brainchild.

You can download Wikipedia and only have it take up about 9 GB of space on your computer. It would definitely come in handy if you need to do research but don't have Internet access.

This video shows a brief history into Wikipedia and how it works. In this video they interview the founder of Wikipedia Jimmy Wales who answers some questions about what Wikipedia is and how it works.

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."

Geographic coverage of Wikipedia. This shows the geographical location of articles, a geographic features, etc. Mapping Wikipedia is a collaboration between TraceMedia and the Oxford Internet Institute.

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 visualization of the latest hot searches from Google Trends portrayed as sliding tiles.

some interesting facts about WIkipedia and it will help us to learn more about it.

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.

Interesting article of secrets of Google and its creation

A look at how the Google doodles are made. The article includes an interview with some of the doodlers of how they get their ideas for Googles new doodles.

Interesting article about the new business side of Twitter. Twitter is planning on becoming a publicly traded company which means stock will be sold to the general public. This article goes over the effects this will have in the future.

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!"