For Extra Credit Today:

I went to a lecture by Gerald C. Kane on "Knowledge Management in a Web 2.0 World: Wikipedia and the Virgina Tech Massacre." I learned some really interesting stuff. Including:

• The NY Times stated the article was better written than their articles on the event (and this was done by 2,652 contributors)
• Wikipedia is run by 7 employees and operates on less than $1.5 million - yet it is the 5th (I believe) most visited site on the web
• The 5th highest rated editor on wikipedia is "WhisperToMe" and he is a 15 year old high school student
• The VT Massacre page is the 3rd most vandalized article on Wikipedia (after Germany and Cannabis)
• Wikipedia has "bots" that automatically fix most problems caused by vandals such as swearing, !!!, CAPS, and completely deleting a page
  
• Overall motivations why people write on wikipedia are:
1. Emotional motivations: way of coping with the tragedy (VT example)
2. Psychological motivations: Many contributors suffer from Asperger's Syndrome
3. Ideological motivations: single-issue editors (gun control for example)

See the video above to check out the break down of the creation of the actual article. Pretty cool.