Shirky's chapter on collaborative production made me think a lot about how Wikipedia has really changed the way that I have come to research things. In this chapter Shirky discusses at intense length the fundamental ideas behind a collaborative site like Wikipedia and how it is fueled through user submitted postings and how these postings are skewed to certain power users. I am posting here to say that I am not ashamed to admit that Wikipedia is easily the first and usually the only site I go to when it comes to looking up anything reference related. Growing up during the time I did I saw the way Wikipedia changed and the way it was interpreted by teachers and professors.
Wikipedia has been seen for years as the lazy students way of researching a topic. Your assignment would be to research the Everett Massacre, write up a small paper on it and cite four different sources. DO NOT USE WIKIPEDIA would be listed on the assignment sheet. My usual response to this is 'yea right' and go ahead and use Wikipedia to my heart's delight. The information there is solid, at least in the dozen times I have proofed it against other sites. As explained in Shirky the quality of these articles is amazingly high for the way it is developed and you can ask any student in this class (I can guarantee they have and do use Wikipedia) and they will tell you that it is a good and well made source of information.
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