COMM325: Blog Entry 4 - Wikipedia

Prompt: Blog entry writing prompt: Assess the benefits and drawbacks of Wikipedia. Does the crowd sourcing truly prevent misinformation? If so, how? 

Wikipedia is a great tool. I use it often usually to satisfy a random question or trivial curiosity. I also use if as a starting point for more serious research. Wikipedia is a great resource for vetting topics for research. By looking up the questioned topic on Wikipedia you can easily see if it is written about often. Even though the actual information can not be used in serious scholarly documents it help to know that other people are interested in the same topic.

Unfortunately I don't think crowd sourcing prevents misinformation. The information is most likely not provide by subject matter experts and even if it is the articles do not receive the same kind of scrutiny that a scholarly journal would. This could potentially cause the information to be bias either by someone with motive or by ignorance of more complete research. I think this is why Wikipedia serves best as a starting place. 

COMM325: Blog Entry 3 - ProPublica and Creative Commons

Prompt: Why does ProPublica use Creative Commons licenses?

ProPublica uses Creative Commons licenses to give readers and follows the ability to share the stories posted on the site. ProPublica does this to increase their readership and the public impact of those pieces. ProPublic and Creative Commons differ from traditional media licenses in that sharing and copying are encouraged. This encouragement is bound by the agreement of the person/site sharing to note that ProPublica is the source of the story and to include the Propublica "PixelPing." This HTML tag, called PixelPing. allow Propublica to track the hits on a particular story in a non-invasive way. This allows them to further track readership and helps them to determine what types stories to pursue in the future. I think that ProPublica is the future of traditional journalism. The site is a great example of a sharing economy. The use of Creative Commons makes it even easier to pass information through the internet without hinderance