Ten things 2007 - a class with Michael Shanks about design: Wikipedia

The Wikipedia Project

The biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. Over two million articles and still growing.

Introduction

Wikipedia has become more and more useful in everyday life. So often does Wikipedia seem to offer answers to some of the most obscure questions that in common use, it reigns supreme for being a quick reference. As the twelfth most popular website, it receives more hits that both eBay and Amazon, and it is only six years old. But as dominant as it is for common use, it has become a chore to cite Wikipedia in academic settings, with the lingering fear that it will destroy the credibility of one's work. This project aims to capture the ways we see Wikipedia being used, and the ethos that surrounds its use. We aim to draw out the everyday connections between Wikipedia and its users via the anecdotal evidence.

We plan on mainly investigating the following lines of research:

Examine the connections between people and Wikipedia in everyday life.
Tie Wikipedia in with course themes.

Our Key Sources:

Wikipedia, naturally
Anecdotes of Wikipedia use from our daily lives
Course material

A Brief Guide

This project has been organized in true weblog fashion, with intentional outside references. While reading the entries, please explore freely, and do not feel bounded by the provided links. Let yourself wander through these entries, bouncing between our blog entries, the Wikipedia entries we note, and others that pique your interest. Click on anything you please, and notice your own use of Wikipedia.