Random Note about Wikipedia

I was editing the Wikipedia page for Accidentally on Purpose (the tv series) and I came across my BIGGEST pet peeve about Wikipedia. I hate when a Wikipedia link is created toward something random that has nothing to do with the article. For example,

"While Billie receives encouragement and advice from her party girl best friend (and fellow journalist) Olivia and her conventional, younger, married sister Abby, she also has to deal with Zack's freeloading friend Davis"

 First of all, "party girl" does not link to anything in Wikipedia, but more importantly, what does that have to do with the tv series? And, who does not know what a party girl is?

Wikipedia Edits

I edited the page on my home town of Lake Forest. (By the way, if you type LakeForest.com into the browser, the Wikipedia page for Lake Forest comes up).

I found information that gave the population data for Lake Forest in 2008, and I added information about former resident and inspiration for Fitzgerald's Daisy Buchanan Ginevra King.

I attempted to edit the page on Katharine Hepburn, but her page had been protected. There were several additions I would have liked to have made, and I think that I need to pursue those changes on the "talk" page. Something I came upon while attempting to make this edit was a post made under this "talk" page about a "deletion campaign" being run by ip address 76.176.167.130. Apparently, someone at this address has been deleting posts about the sexuality and queer identities of actors such as Katharine Hepburn and Carey Grant.

I also added a friend as a "famous alumnae" of my high school and put a "watch" on the edit to see how long until it is changed.

Wikipedia

I think that people take Wikipedia with a grain of salt. It's interesting to look for information on Wikipedia for small information, but I don't think that I would ever use it as a reference for an essay. If I was watching a movie and it brought up something I had never heard of, I might browse it's Wikipedia article. It is a useful starting point.

Google Takes Over

Upon reading New Yorker article "Searching for Trouble; Why Google is on its guard" a few things stuck out to me. First of all, these facts are astounding:

Google search takes in about four of every ten online advertising dollars, and last year Google's revenues exceeded twenty-two billion dollars, more than two-thirds of the thirty billion in total U.S. newspaper advertising projected for this year.

Does print advertising play a signifant part in revenues anymore? Is it even worth investing in print advertising if online advertising is so much more profitable? 

A family friend owns packaging and shipping company Uline. It was a profitable business but it was not until the company paid for the Google AdWord "packaging," among others, that business boomed. Now, whenever someone types "packaging" into Google, ULINE.com is the first site that pops up.

Epic On Facebook Privacy Outdated

A lot of the Epic site on Facebook privacy is out of date. I realize that the top of the page updates with the different changes that Facebook makes, but the "Encyclopedia" toward the bottom is completely outdated. So much so that I did not know how to navigate what was still true of Facebook and what was not.

USA Today Web Platform

USA Today does a great job with their web site. If you want to finish reading an article, you must watch a very short ad. Also, they dedicate a substantial amount of space to their news bloggers, who keep readers up to date while the magazine is not updated.

Annie Le Murder vs. '98 Murder of Suzanne Jovin

What I found most interesting about the coverage of the Annie Le murder was the spotlight it put on the violence in New Haven. When I first heard about what happened, I immediately began to scour the web for more information. (It sounded like something straight out of Law and Order SVU.)

From clicking random links on the right hand side of many pages, I came across the murder of Suzanne Jovin in 1998. The Yale Daily News did an interesting piece in which they compared the two murders, the public's reaction to the murders, and how they were covered by the media.

I think that a lot of the fascination with this case, especially on the Trinity campus, is that this horrible thing happened to such an average person. I mentioned the case to a friend, who informed me that there is a web site that shows crime rates on different campuses. She said that Yale University pays this site -- which I should mention in full disclosure she did not remember the name of -- to falsify the crime rates of New Haven... hm, sounds like a conspiracy theory, but still, it raises some pretty big issues about the responsibility of such sites.