coeller

So, maybe you’ve noticed or maybe you haven’t, but I feel it’s probably appropriate to give credit where credit is due this week as we talk about intellectual property and copyright.  In the title for each of my weekly writings I use a quote and those quotes all come from the mouth of George W. Bush.  It’s amazing how well his words often lend themselves to the topic at hand (example of when this did not work out - this week, as Hanukkah and bin Laden don’t have a lot to do with copyright, but it was just too funny to not use it, and for that I apologize).

George W. Bush has said, “I can only speak to myself.”  Unfortunately, this is not true, so as long as we all have to listen we may as well enjoy it.

I’m going to go out on a limb and choose the black sheep among all things academic - wikipedia. I know it’s written by people who might not know what they’re talking about and there might be some incorrect information, but I really think that it’s one of the best places on the web to learn what you want to know about a subject in a short amount of time. So what makes wikipedia so good?

I actually like their frontpage where they have news stories, a featured article, and an “on this day” section. The featured article and “on this day” sections make for great, interesting time-wasting material, but more importantly I think that following the links in their news articles gives potential to explore as much of the background to any news story that you want to learn more about. Say you’re reading about the Canadian prime minister and then want to find out who the prime minister was before him. Easy to do in wikipedia, not so easy on cnn.com. Or you may want to learn more about how the Canadian government is set up in order to understand the prime minister’s actions in that context. Wikipedia can do that for you.

I simply find that wikipedia gives you the information you need and links to more if you want it.

In terms of design I think they put interesting material out on the front page in a very clean, efficient, and easy-to-read manner, but the search function is obviously the most used function and it works well too. I like that they have links to other related articles at the bottom of the page and links throughout if you want to supplement the information on the subject you’re reading about with whatever information they link to. The perfect example of how well wikipedia does things is the Japan article. You’re not inundated with images that clog your browser, but you can link anywhere in the outline of the article and get the essential infromation very quickly.
Not only that but wiki is coming out with lots of other types of information as well, so if you don’t like them now, you better start liking them soon.