Wikipedia as Prime Example of an Information Network
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/wikipedia/12100516/How-Wikipedia-changed-the-world.html
The article discusses how Wikipedia has revolutionized the internet and the spread of knowledge over the last 16 years. Articles have been written in about 25o languages and there are about 38 million articles on wikipedia. The idea behind wikipedia was a crowdsourcing platform whose mission is to spread knowledge not to make a profit. One of the biggest reasons wikipedia has survived this long is the devout editors and contributors to the content on wikipedia. In the internet age, people want quick access to information. Wikipedia’s format/style of written knowledge has become a staple of internet consumers.
This article relates to learning about the Structure of the Web in lecture and Chapter 13. Specially, we learned that an information network is a network in which the basic units being connected are pieces of information, and links join pieces of information that are related to each other in some fashion. Wikipedia at its essence is a network of articles/information that all links to each other. Researching one topic leads to other wikipedia articles you can read about.
In fact there is even a game that shows you how the individual wikipedia pages are all linked together. The game found on
gives you a starting topic/page and you have to find the end topic/wikipedia page without ever leaving wikipedia.