Looking at different Wikipedia articles, it’s interesting seeing the amount of attention each item gets depending on the subject. Nobody cares about Malcolm Gladwell, it seems. (Very sad. Very very sad.) The updates are small and focused on fixing typos or confirming whether he has a brother or not. Elon Musk, on the other hand, is a treasure trove of misinformation and fact-checking. There are updates being made by the hour about controversial figures, and many of the updates depend on checking the validity of claims being made on Wikipedia, rather than typos or formatting errors. In some Wikipedia edits there are fun little discussions being had about pop culture, particularly whether it’s appropriate to mention Nancy Reagan’s sex life on her page, given that it was a popular meme in early 2022. It’s fascinating seeing the array of care and the kinds of vandalism that Wikipedia articles can be subject to, depending on the item in question.
With regards to Creative Commons. The concerns with copyright and creative commons we had were focused on the rights we had to change the work of another group. We went through brief discussions on whether we should indicate that we had done work on the website, or if we should try to create a seamless transition from their work to ours. What we decided was to do a combination of both. In some cases, it was clear that additional work had been done on the websites. Examples include situations where we had to update the programs used, or explicitly state that some programs were no longer available. In other cases, we made changes that wouldn’t be obvious to the user unless they were familiar with what we had done. There were multiple cases where broken links and dead programs would be whisked away because they did not provide any additional information to us, nor the user. It was a tough line to walk between two extremes of wanting to update a website and fundamentally changing the work a group did, and wanting to keep a website as original as possible and hurting the user as a result. Luckily, our group consistently walked that line carefully and gracefully.
