5th Day of Class

Today, we started off talking about how credible stuff actually is on the Internet. Does the information you're reading come from a credible source or not? Wikipedia has a "paper trail" in that you can see how the topic evolved. Also, I hope this comes out to be understandable since I'm running on empty today (2hrs of sleep).

Examples in Wikipedia of controversies related to credibility:
- Essjay Controversy: Person said they were a teacher and had a Phd but he didn't (they also worked for Wikipedia and were fired).
- Wikipedia Biography Controversy: Person said another person was involved in the assassination of JFK.
- Scientology Controversies: Various information was posted from a certain area and they banned the IP Addresses from that area from being able to edit topics.

We also talked about misinformation, how some things look logically correct but if you break it down piece by piece it can mostly be garbage.

*Teaser: There may be extra credit available... if Kale says something in class that is clearly wrong (misinformation), you can research it, and e-mail him to let him know that you figured it out. Keep this in mind when listening in class over the next couple of weeks.

We need to post a page on the wiki on a topic of our choosing... Assignment 6.

Random Chatter: Talked about people with the power of influence, power of suggestion, sales & advertising tactics, robots, cloning, etc...