c) playing with CICADA

I changed the positioning of the quick line about this page being a “sandbox” and italicized “course description” – very simple things, but I thought they were good structural changes. The whole process was pretty easy and organized – since only one person (or one group) could edit one page at a time, things went pretty smoothly. You can see where the page is now, how you want to change it, and if you need to consult with someone about making a change. I didn’t personally interact with anyone on this task; I didn’t think it was necessary for the relatively minor changes I made. Overall it seems pretty clear that trying to (and actually succeeding at) making adjustments to personalized wikis than an official article site on Wikipedia. I was expecting this, seeing as there aren’t any overarching powers stopping us from making changes to a private page that only 20 or so individuals can see in the first place.

The whole idea reminds me of our constitutional right of free speech and all of the controversy associated with it – you can have one hundred percent free speech as long as you are talking in a closed environment where you aren’t in a position to offend people (or enough people anyway) to create any problems. According to US law we can say whatever we want wherever we want within the United States as long as is isn’t libel or slander. However the more widespread the source of “speech” comes from (say, the New York Times) the more careful you have to be with what you say, because there are more people who could take offense and subsequently take legal action against the source (even if it was the truth that was written, or merely an opinion piece that makes no overarching claims).

However what concerns me mostly is that this leaves many open options for people to create slander in semi-closed environments. While the New York Times does not have the luxury of producing whatever it likes (due to its editors, funders, readers and so on) a small town paper does (more or less) of which there are thousands. Even though sending a message through many of these less widespread methods of communication would be less efficient than sending it through one extremely widespread one, the message can still get through loud and clear to enough people.