New Concepts in Citations
House on Red Corner · 2006-10-20
As an online university student, I face the prospect of making citations to support my accusations statements. With the advent of all things WEb 2.0 and the Wikipedia, these challenges have been increased beyond the scope of my past experiences with citing sources. In High School, there was not a broadrange of internet adoption unless you were Matthew Broderick in War Games, it was pretty much no existent (NOTE: I did connect to some BBS’es but that was merely silly games, none of this actually doing something with it!)
SO today, in my newsreader I get this wonderful essay about the manner which Biella Coleman discusses the trick nature of researching a subject which is entirely on the internet, the internet itself. I was unaware of the version numbers which are contained within WikiMedia applications, and think that in the future as I make my citations for class, I will be including these.
Unfortunately, many of my professors do not believe in the basic concepts behind the construction of sources such as the Wikipedia, they tend to be wary of the information as produced by an amalgamation of anonymous sources. Alas, the open source/standards/information movement is not a hippie counter culture to the “All Mighty Establishment!” It is a groundswell of common folks and interests being connected through the communications technology and no longer do we require a central repository of knowledge, we can mirror that knowledge across many bases and through many processes and forms.