Web 2.0 Tools of the Week: 7/27 – 8/2

And that’s just the English version!

This week, we are revisiting some classic Web 2.0 tools, making them more suitable for our purposes, and trying out the self-proclaimed “Best Answer to Any Question” that’s (gasp) not Google!  Check it out by following the link!

Wikipedia – The Free Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you’ve heard of (and probably made extensive use of) Wikipedia.  Perhaps most famously as “The Thing that Killed Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft Encarta“, Wikipedia.org has become the go-to resource for high school students writing papers on topics they know next to nothing about.  Also, it consistently ranks in Alexa.com’s top ten global sites. Known popularly as, “the encyclopedia anyone can edit, the official About Wikipedia page gives a more complete description: (there’s something so meta about looking up Wikipedia on Wikipedia):

Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free-content encyclopedia project supported by the Wikimedia Foundation and based on a model of openly editable content. The name “Wikipedia” is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites, from the Hawaiian word wiki, meaning “quick”) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia’s articles provide links designed to guide the user to related pages with additional information.

(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About)

It’s no wonder Wikipedia so quickly outpaced knowledge giants like the aforementioned Britannica and Encarta.  Unlike Britannica, Wikipedia is free, and doesn’t take a forklift to move if you ever do.  Also, unlike Encarta, you don’t have to own a computer running a Microsoft operating system (you only need access to a device that can reach the internet), Wikipedia can adjust quickly to changes in content, and since anyone can edit it, results are (presumably, although there are protections in place) written by experts and in a fashion that is designed to disseminate both informational and practically useful information.  Since Wikipedia also reaches out to various sources on the Web, there are some concerns about link rot, it’s well worth the trade off to have connections to updated and dynamically presented information, as well as the social media capabilities that may come with collaborative editing.  I personally haven’t gotten up the courage to edit a Wikipedia page, but I definitely support those that are active members of those communities.

Wikispaces – The World’s Best Wiki Platform
(http://www.wikispaces.com)

Wikipedia is great, but for some purposes, it may be too large, disperse, or general to be useful.  This is where smaller wiki services like Wikispaces has carved out their niches.  Allowing users to to co-create mini-Wikipedias for their own aims, Wikispaces and others like it help users create online repositories that are just as collaborative as the big W, but have the potential to be more targeted and refined in scope.  The creators of Wikispaces regard it as:

…dedicated to building the world’s easiest to use wiki service by listening closely to the ever growing Wikispaces community. We now host millions of wikis for over fourteen million people and have products designed for the smallest classroom and the world’s largest corporations and institutions.

(Source: http://www.wikispaces.com/about).

Interestingly, the makers of Wikispaces also include a values statement of sorts on their About page, which describes Simplicity, Community, Openness, Usability and Service as central to their mission and vision for the site and their services.  It’s pretty cool to watch those values play out not only through how users interact with their service, but also through the posts on their staff blog.  A number of faculty members in my academic program have used Wikispaces for their own resources, and I am working on a Produsage Project for the EME 6414 course that also leverages Wikispaces’ services.  I’ll let you know all about that in a later post!

Quora – The best answer to any question
(https://www.quora.com)

It takes a lot in this day and age to say you are the best at anything.  Given the information overflow that is the modern internet, to claim your service provides the best answer to any question really takes  a lot of guts.  Enter: Quora; one part search engine, one part blog platform, one part knowledge engine, and one part social network.  I can only imagine what the white board must have looked like when the developers of this site were coming up with its construction!  So what is Quora, besides the self-proclaimed “best answer to any question”?  The aforementioned developers describe it largely as the democratization of knowing:

Quora’s mission is to share and grow the world’s knowledge. We want to democratize access to knowledge of all kinds—from politics to painting, cooking to coding, etymology to experiences—so if someone out there knows something, anyone else can learn it. Quora makes it easy to get your questions answered, share your own knowledge, and browse the most interesting information people across the world want to share.

(Source: https://www.quora.com/about)

So, humble aspirations, really. No, not really at all. I suppose a lofty goal requires a robust platform, and Quora seems to be just that.  The description provided continues to extoll it’s virtues as a place to get answers, share what you know, to read, and to think.  That doesn’t sound like a bad place to me!  Interestingly, the Quora site has its own blog, but it hasn’t been updated in a month, as of this writing.  Perhaps all of their traffic is going to to Ashton freakin‘ Kutcher’s Quora Page.  I know that’s where I’ll be.

So those are the Web 2.0 Tools for the Week of 7/27 – 8/2.  Have you been using any of these in your life, dear reader?  And if so, for what purpose?  Given the nature of these tools, are there any you would add to the list?  Let me know what you’ve been up to in the comments section below!

Top Image Credit: Wikipedia: About (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About)