Wikipedia initial post

       Before reading the articles by Brown, Van Dijck, and Royal, I took all of the advice my professors gave me in not trusting Wikipedia as a reliable sources. As a university student I was well educated about the pitfalls of using Wikipedia as a way to validate an opinion. To me, Wikipedia has always been like a chat in the cafeteria at lunch, everyone has the opportunity to present their opinion to which some opposition may be met. Brown and Duguid (1996) support this notion that once written or printed material is circulated, a community forms and creates discussion on a larger level. The main difference between the validity of a printed document and a Wiki page is that a document written forty years ago had to go through several processes before it was circulated and determined to be valid. As Royal and Kapila (2009) argue, the internet is so massive and intricate which means that it is not possible to regulate online posts as well as printed documents were controlled under social institutions.  It was actually surprising to find out from the Wikipedia page on regulations that there are rules and guideline that users must follow.
       After reading the articles about Wikipedia and the evolution of media, my opinion of what Wikipedia is and how it functions has not changed much, however my opinion how society reflects how Wikipedia functions has. Van Dijck and Nieborg (2009) explain how social media is reinforcing the social institutions that used to govern which category documents fell into (good or ill) and whether they were valid or not. This article was very informative because it addressed the fact that Wikipedia has not totally revolutionized society, it has forced society to come up with terms like co-creativity and mass community as a way to escape the negative connotations of phrases like consumer and mass market. Before reading the articles, Wikipedia was a website that could be glanced over as a way for me to start brainstorming direction I wanted to take with my research and I will continue to look at it that way. After reading the articles my understanding of how much Wikipedia is actually controlled has changed. I understand that revolutionary terms like co-creative team and mass communities are really the same as mindless consumers and free marketing information. By posting our opinions in online forums like Wikipedia, we are allowing ourselves to be analyzed by institutions to better market to us and appeal to our consumers needs in a more sophisticated and sneaky way.