My Task |
Largest Collection |
For this project I was tasked with contributing to Wikipedia. One of, if not the largest single collection of general knowledge to have existed.
I decided to use my home town as the article I would be contributing too. I made this choice since it is probably one of the lesser detailed articles on Wikipedia and a place I have a decent amount of knowledge about. I viewed the current article for my town and noticed that it lacked any information regarding the high school there. In the video above you can see how I insert a brief description of the 2 high schools within the town, along with some information on each of them. I sourced this information via their own websites and government information. The video above has been uploaded to youtube, and annotated using youtube's own annotation feature during each step of the task. |
I previously mentioned how Wikipedia is most likely the single largest collection of general knowledge to have ever existed.
The magnitude of the site it's self is something that is too much for the human mind to even grasp, and any estimates as to how much information actually exists within the website would be some what futile. This is mentioned in C Shirky's Book 'Cognitive Surplus', where the figure of approximately one hundred million hours of human thought (Shirky 10) has gone into the vast collection of knowledge available on the site. Although this figure is said to be a "back-of-the-envelope calculation", so it's not accurate, however the point is clear, thats an incredible amount of time and thought. |
References
- Shirky, Clay. Cognitive Surplus. New York: Penguin Press, 2010. Print.