HIST 390-001 The Digital Past Fall 2013

This site describes the differences between copyright, trademark and patent and has examples to help differentiate them.

These are the standards for machine readable catalouging for libraries. In addition to bibliographies, MARC's can also record other codes as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article discusses the study of how Wikipedia is just as accurate as Britannica!

Yep, that's the one I mentioned in class -- thanks for finding it, Claire!

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

Picture of an old card catalog.

For those who have ever wondered how many different books are out there in the world.

Great minds think alike -- I posted the same thing. :) The estimate keeps going up, probably because more books keep being published!

I found this to be really helpful if anyone is interested in the history of wikis. Wikipedia is one of the most popular wiki websites, but not the first.

Another useful link, Paola! Thanks.

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.

The fundamental principles by which Wikipedia operates can be summarized in five " pillars"

I attended one of the Open Access Week events in which a contributor from Wikipedia came and spoke about Wikipedia. I found the presentation to be really interesting. He spoke about the five pillars of Wikipedia (which we've already learned about) among other things.

Thanks, Paola. I'll add 5 points to your Exam 2 grade when I grade it.

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

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

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