Wikipedia

-A quick fundamental argument flaw that I've discovered may be corrected later, however at first glance, "Any errors you have seen and not as yet corrected are your fault". This is fundamentally inaccurate because if his first argument is that Wikipedia is the most used and most visited encyclopedia out there; 1), how do we know the post is factually wrong if we're looking it up in the first place, and 2), since, as he has stated that wiki "began to drive other fact sources out of business", where else can we look to fact-check the fact we're looking up? Therefore, it is by no means at all, my fault that there are errors on wikipedia if I in fact don't know the source material nor have another place to look up the same data. (7) In my opinion, it is the person who knows the correct answers and is browsing and/or trolling pages that they could update and edit but choose not to.

-With regards to the Italian earthquake paragraphs, specifically after the article had been translated into 20 different languages and edited and updated 200 times, there was a push and an continuance to stay on that piece of news when the rest of the worlds media had moved on. These contributors stayed with it, picking up new information and updating it days or weeks after it had happened and weeks after it left people's thoughts. What I found to be very interesting was the intricate detail and want and even need for this detail about the specific towns affected, the nationalities of victims, and the foreshock and aftershock data (9).

-In discussing the "Criticism of George W. Bush" and subsequently the denying of the existence of a parallel "Criticism of Barack H. Obama" (13), it is interesting to note why and how these articles are not in existence any longer. For three years Dalby noted, the bashing of Bush article was posted on wikipeda. Bush bashing was not only popular but it even achieved popular culture status. Socially, especially in college, when Bush came up, if you didn't publicly state your displeasure with him and his policies, then you were shunned. This was somewhat difficult being a Republican. Yes, I am a Jewish Republican...I'm breakin' through boarders and stigmas my friend. So yes, I in fact voted for him twice because I'm old and his first term was when I was an 18yr old senior in high school, so I actually voted for him twice. Not that it mattered because I live in NJ and this state goes blue no matter what; but for personal gratification, I voted for him twice. So this Bush bashing was rampant and popular, and the second the Democrats won the presidency, all of a sudden any opposing view point was exiled by Wikipedia? Yup. That's the short answer. The Bush article was allowed to stay up longer than any anti-Obama article. Soon after Obama's presidency though, the anti-Bush article was removed. Now a second point. By trying to sneak in personal dissatisfactions with Obama, one had to either put them in existing articles or make new ones like the "Obama Bear Market" (13). This title was changed to not include Obama's name at all. I just searched for "Obamacare" which is a common phrase used to describe the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" which is exactly the match that will come up when searching for Obamacare. This is actually somewhat disconcerting because there isn't even an article which refers to the fact that people and the media consider the Patient Protection etc. act to be named Obamacare, nor is there any reference to the popular culture fact that Obama's name is attached to the phrase Obamacare because it was under his watch that our health care system was "revamped". The internet, especially wiki, has to have Obamacare as an article even if it speaks about how the Patient Protection etc. law is referred to as Obamacare, just like wiki must have an article that discusses historically the Bush bashing and how and why it was popular.

-Dalby cites three things that allows Wiki to exist. First are the works of Pliny the Elder and a Chinese philosopher and astronomer named Shen Kuo. Second is the formation and even creation of the dictionary. And third is the sourcebook. Each one as a stand-alone book is alright, but not complete. Dalby argues that "we must plait the three traditions together into a perfect encyclopedia, logically arranged, quick to access, properly sourced" (26). He goes on to state that a printed version of this would be almost impossible to use and access and therefore needs to be not in a print format. Transferring the knowledge to other languages was paramount in order to achieve this harmonious encyclopedia concept of a perfect knowledge source. Only in 2001 was Wiki first able to be written in other languages and then only a few languages. It took a few years for the Wiki contributors to actually start writing in other languages and for authors to request new language formats in which they could write in. (35-43)

-On page 53 when discussing the 9/11 updates to WP which happened faster than their "rival" of Britannica, the user Clasqm wrote that we should be looking beyond beating Britannica and do something extraordinary, like have a page dedicated to each person in the world (53). I find this somewhat funny in that we now have Facebook which is essentially a page for everyone in he world, however I obviously understand the differences between WP and FB; I just found it humorous that his idea was a great idea that was about to happen in a few years.

-When searching in Google for something, it is often times the case that if WP has an article on it, it is the first hit, and if it's not the first hit, it is almost guaranteed to be in the top 5 hits. Dalby says there are three reasons for this. First, WP has a lot of local links on its pages and apparently Google search software likes pages with lots of links. Second, lots of other sites link to WP. So there is a back-and-forth of linking which the Google search software also finds attractive and will therefore place the site with lots of links to it on top. Third, people tend to click on the WP hits and they are favored by the browser, therefore Google remembers and counts the number of hits and places the site with the most hits on top (84). So to sum up, WP and Google are almost a perfect match for each other, although they at one point tried to be enemies (83). I wonder if Google helped facilitate the powerfulness of WP? Even if it didn't directly affect the articles on WP, it certainly showed and lead browsers to the site whom then had the freedom to add information. So while Google didn't help make WP, in my opinion, it certainly helped it grow and become the dominant search database on the web.