Wikipedia

1. In my experience with Wikipedia, the great majority of the site's information is accurate. Teachers discourage students from using Wikipedia in research, as they should, but a lot of times when it proves difficult to get good search results from academic search engines, doing a Wikipedia search is a great way to uncover basic information on the topic that may be used to strengthen your search on more respected sites. Another method I use to improve my usage of Wikipedia is to check the sources they list at the bottom of each page. The sources given are often quite reliable, and have proven to me to be a valuable asset of Wikipedia.

2. When considering whether Wikipedia could conquer expertise, I think a good starting point is to look at the attitude of people like Kate. In her entry, she points out that if she needs to know a piece of medical information (which I think is a good example because medicine is a field based around experts with years of schooling), she would turn to many places other than Wikipedia to start her search. I think this attitude toward Wikipedia is pretty widespread, and it is very difficult for a site like Wikipedia to shake off beliefs held about it. Ask Jeeves, for example, was a widely used search engine for a while, but was not nearly user-friendly as Google and others. After users began to become more and more accustomed to Google's user-friendly face, they did not want to use Ask Jeeves, even when the makers embarked on a PR campaign in effort to save the site's public image. Wikipedia may try to establish more credibility, and they may do so to some degree. But to state that Wikipedia could conquer expertise effectively enough to attract and retain users looking to uncover respectable and reliable research is an unlikely claim.

3. I found the Bilton reading very interesting. It's not that the ideas he wrote about were anything new, it's just that I never really thought of it in the way he did. As he points out, "sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link, or story." This is absolutely true today, I guess I just didn't think about the fact that people are becoming so sharing-oriented in their everyday activities. According to the reading, people are aggregators, filtering, compiling, and sharing information to make it easier for others to access the important stuff, leaving the boring, irrelevant material behind. I guess I do this some, but not often. I rarely post pictures on Facebook, rather, I just have pictures of me on my page that others have uploaded. The main way I act as an aggregator is with videos, sharing funny ones with friends.

-Ryan Stefani