Wikipedia

I have talked about Wikipedia previously, but this week I’m going to go a bit more in depth.

Wikipedia was first launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales (at the bottom of this page) and Larry Sanger. Since then it has now become the most popular general reference work on the web. The name Wikipedia is derived from the Hawaiian word for fast, wiki, and encyclopaedia. It now has 12 million articles, 2,770,000 of which are in English. It was originally meant to fuel the website Nupedia, but this site quickly failed and Wikipedia number one. If you would like some more information on Wikipedia, try Wikipedia’s page on it. The Wikipedia logo is below.

However there is a lot of vandalism on Wikipedia. Although usually Wikipedia can filter out obvious vandalism in seconds, it may take a lot longer to find less obvious vandalism, such as deliberate mistakes on particular topics. Some pages have been vandalised so much that Wikipedia has locked them, meaning that no one can edit them anymore. This subtler vandalism means that many questions are raise on the reliability of the source.

One way, and a much advised way of checking if something is reliable is to check the references at the bottom of the page. If there are references, this usually means that the source is reliable. However it is not good enough to check if there are references. By clicking the hyperlink, you may check where the author(s) have gotten information from.

You can also check using your own knowledge. If you know, for example, that William Shakespeare was in fact baptised on the 26th of April, and no the 23rd of April, you know that this source should not be trusted completely and that you should look for an alternative source for finding out information.

However not all Wikipedia pages that aren’t vandalised are reliable. Something else you should check is the date that the wiki was last edited, because it may have been outdated. For example, Beyoncé’s page on Wikipedia was last updated 15th February 2009, which means that it doesn’t mention anything about her latest song ‘Still in Love’. You can check the update history of a page by clicking the tab named ‘history’ at the top of the page.

But now turning to the scale of Wikipedia. Clay Shirky tells us in his book Here Comes Everybody that less than 2% of all Wikipedia users contribute. Out of this 2%, very few make large contributions. In fact about 200 users have made 100 or over contributions. The second most active user contributes only half the amount of the most active user, and the tenth most active user contributes a tenth. This shows that without the top ten contributors, Wikipedia would quickly become useless.

And so to conclude Wikipedia is incredibly successful. It has had over 2,800,000 articles and raised £6,000,000 last year. Vandalism is an issue that the few Wikipedia staff are working on. However most of Wikipedia is left to the volunteers who help contribute to Wikipedia. If you help to contribute to Wikipedia, it will help fuel it for longer.

Tags and Del.icio.us

Today I'm going to tell you about how tagging is useful for sites such as flickr, when you search for photos and how websites can be tagged on Delicious.

First I will quote what a 'tag' is, using wikipedia. A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file)'. If you would like to find out more about tags then this link will bring you to the wikipedia page about tags.

Tagging a photo allows people to search for an image that they thing would be represented by a particular word and would come up with related searches. Well, Delicious does the same, except that instead of images, you have web sites and u have all the possible tags listed down in a column.


First, some history of Delicious. It was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, but just 2 years later was bought by Yahoo on 9th December 2005 for approximately 15-30,000,000 (US) dollars. It has over 5 million users, and is one of the most popular social bookmarking services. Some people say its essential, others say that it is simple and useful.

Delicious allows you to store your bookmarks and tag them, while sharing them with friends and colleagues. This makes this not only useful and academic, but fun and social. However there are some advantages and disadvantages of Delicious.

First the advantages: Delicious is very easy to use, and you don't have to have a great knowledge of computers to use it. It can also save useful links that you could forget. It can also be accessed on any computer with internet connection in the world. However, some disadvantages are that it requires online connection, and when someone tags they could be thinking only about themselves and not of what others might tag it as if they were to search for a particular site.

Overall, I would say that Delicious is a great website that can be accessed anywhere in the world and is useful, simple and fun. I, along 5,000,000 others, would recommend most people, whether good with computers or not, to join now for free and try it out.

Flickr

Flickr is a site that allows people to post their videos on and share photographs. It is so popular that by one month it had 7,445 photos and now it claims to have over 3 billion (that’s three followed by nine noughts!!) images (the 3 billionth is on the right). It was created by ‘Ludicorp’, a German company that was bought by yahoo in 2005 (which meant that Flickr was theirs too). Flickr itself was launched on February 2004.

Posting photos meant that different people looked at them differently. They could start discussions about them, and photo sharing was fun and social. The photos are stored safely and stay there permanently, so if your computer crashes, the photos will still be on the web. And with Flickr you can adjust your privacy to let people see them, whether it is the whole public, family and / or friends, or maybe just yourself.

Posting photos onto Flickr is much more of an advantage than just letting them rust in their barely intact albums. And when they’re seen once, they are soon very quickly forgotten. And so it would be better if there was somewhere that you could store them where everyone can see them ... aha! Flickr! It is a great place for placing old photos of your history and I repeat that you choose who gets to see them and who doesn’t. If you just want your friends and family to see them, you can select that option. However if you want to be a bit more adventurous and want to find some honest feedback, you could chose the public option, letting anyone see and comment on your pictures.

Also, photos can be tagged and you can look these photos up. So for example if we took a picture of a lighthouse, we could tag ‘sea’, ‘harbour, ‘Portsmouth’ and ‘lighthouse’. That meant that every time we searched for ‘Portsmouth’ we would get this photo along with many others.

As you can see, Flickr is a very popular site, primarily because it is useful, fun and social. It can store photos and let other people comment on them. It is a great way of sharing your memories with those who you love, or of showing off all the fantastic holidays that you’ve been to with the reast of Flickr users.

Facebook: looks so innocent and yet so deceptive

In this blog, you will find out more about how facebook privacy settings.

However before I start with my blog, I urge you that if you have facebook, to look at this website on privacy settings. It tells you about how you can be removed from Google searches, who can see your embarrassing photos, how to keep your friendship private, or how to keep your contact information private. This website was really good and it was a lot of help to me when I was changing my facebook account.

Now let me start with a quote of what Facebook says about its safety. ‘Despite Facebook's safety and privacy controls, Facebook cannot guarantee that its site is entirely free of illegal, offensive, pornographic or otherwise inappropriate material, or that its members will not encounter inappropriate or illegal conduct from other members. Consequently, you may encounter such content and conduct.’ Frankly this is absolutely ridiculous. If Facebook can care enough to note what you are doing with your every move, then surely they can check every single post to scan for this.


Later Facebook redeems itself by putting these safety tips up:

• Never share your password with anyone
• Adjust your privacy settings to match your level of comfort, and review them often
• Be cautious about posting and sharing personal information, especially information that could be used to identify you or locate you offline, such as your address or telephone number
• Report users and content that violate our Terms of Use
• Block and report anyone who sends you unwanted or inappropriate communications

However it is no use of putting it where people rarely see it. I didn’t know about these privacy settings until a couple of weeks ago. They should be on display in an obvious place.

I hope that now you are starting to feel like you ought to adjust your privacy settings. If you would like a little help on doing so, this website is a lot of use, telling you what level of security is recommended and why you should do so.

I will finish by saying that you should be extremely cautious of Facebook. It has a surprising amount of tricks up its sleeves. Next time you use Facebook, think about your privacy settings. and if you are thinking of getting Facebook, think about what sort of privacy you want and if you are willing to give you online identity to Facebook.