Issues and Context for Friday's (11/11) GOP debate at Wofford College

We at the Wofford College library have gathered together information and resources for tomorrow night's GOP debate on campus. The page points to some of the current major foreign policy/national security issues, but it also includes links to authoritative sources for foreign policy and national security information such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the U.S. Department of State, and the National Security Council.

The page also information about the history of presidential debates, feeds and podcasts from a variety of media outlets, and links to the candidates' websites and social media sites. One nifty little gadget we found is posted on the "interactive media" tab: a live politician popularity checker developed by Google trends.

And, oh yeah, this guide also features some of the cool stuff we have in archives and special collections related to politics.

Use this guide as your source for reliable information before, during, and after tomorrow night's debate.

Wikipedia is a Mess, Wikipedians Say

Sven Manguard, a Wikipedia volunteer, recently published an essay in which he noted that over 5% of the articles in English in the community-authored encyclopedia contained no source citations for the "facts" they assert. Manguard concludes with a plea for help in tackling the backlog - the "monster under the rug," as he calls it.

A staff member of the Wikimedia Foundation (which owns and operates Wikipedia) responded, acknowledging workflow and management problems in how articles are created and maintained in Wikipedia:

It seems that this pattern comes up over and over again; where things are seriously broken, it's because there's no system to channel resources appropriately. So you need to make appeals for heroic behavior. This is unsustainable.

Manguard and the author of the article below point to Germany, whose Wikipedia volunteers have a quarterly competition (Wartungsbausteinwettbewerb or "maintenance component competition") to combat their backlog.

If you want to help, you can go to the Wikipedia community portal page.

If you are looking for reliable sources to cite, visit the library and ask a librarian!

Full article: Wikipedia is a Mess, Wikipedians Say: 1 in 20 Articles Bare of References

How today’s college students use Wikipedia

Here's a recent study on the use of Wikipedia by students:

How today’s college students use Wikipedia for course–related research
by Alison J. Head and Michael B. Eisenberg
First Monday, Volume 15, Number 3 - 1 March 2010

Abstract:
Findings are reported from student focus groups and a large–scale survey about how and why students (enrolled at six different U.S. colleges) use Wikipedia during the course–related research process. A majority of respondents frequently used Wikipedia for background information, but less often than they used other common resources, such as course readings and Google. Architecture, engineering, and science majors were more likely to use Wikipedia for course–related research than respondents in other majors. The findings suggest Wikipedia is used in combination with other information resources. Wikipedia meets the needs of college students because it offers a mixture of coverage, currency, convenience, and comprehensibility in a world where credibility is less of a given or an expectation from today’s students.

Read the article

WOLFRAM/ALPHA: Computational Knowledge Engine

This is not a search engine. Instead of searching the Web and returning links, it generates answers to questions by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base.

How is WOLFRAM/ALPHA different from Wikipedia? Here is a quote from the WOLFRAM/ALPHA website regarding the comparison made between the two sources of information: “Wikipedia gives you pages of narrative about topics. WolframAlpha computes answers to specific questions you ask, just giving facts, not narrative. WolframAlpha often includes sidebar links to Wikipedia.”

Examples by topics range from Mathmatics, Statistics, Data Analysis and Compter Systems to Socioconomic Data, Music, Culture and Media plus many more categories.

URL=http://www.wolframalpha.com/