Sunday, October 7, 2012

Unit 3, Post #2, Wikipedia for a subject search


On October 7, 2012, I used the Wikipedia.org search feature for the general topic of “privacy”. I found a definition and history of the word in addition a long list of related topics, which I am using for my keywords from the site. The following keywords related to my subject were “see also” topics: Civil liberties, Digital identity, Expectation of privacy, Information privacy, Information privacy law, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Personal rights, Mind your own business, Privacy law, Privacy laws of the United States, Privacy policy, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Privacy software, Private sphere, Privacy-enhancing technologies, Profiling practices, Public figure, Solitude, and Surveillance. The search process resulted in a noticeably different type of information in the results. It immediately displayed short blurbs of publicly edited entries of general types of privacy categories along with some historical information, in contrast to the more specific articles found with "deep web" searching. The article had been edited as recently as September 27, 2012.

The Wikipedia.org has a lengthy page regarding citing them as source at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citing_Wikipedia#Citing_Wikipedia. It is generally recommended that Wikipedia only be used as a “general source”, not as a “primary source”.

2 comments:

  1. Hi, Shane:

    I like how Wikipedia is not including a disclaimer of sorts. It is a good place to get a little overview and context about your topic. A good place to start.

    Cheers,
    Andrea

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ooops, I meant to say, Wikipedia is NOW including a disclaimer, a rather important distinction...

    ReplyDelete