This class we talked a lot about crowdsourcing, freedom of information, and started on the topic of copyrighting. Wikipedia was cited as one of the best, if not the best example we have today on the accuracy of information due to crowdsourcing, the pages are just out there and pretty much anyone can add to these pages, with more people looking at and checking it for accuracy whenever they please, editing it, and then adding their own information. There are so many people who know at least a little bit on so many different topics, that you can get highly accurate and detailed information on anything you want just from putting it out to a random group of people. That’s insane to me. We talked a little bit about encyclopedias, how they were created during the time of the French Revolution, which must have been hectic for the authors, and how it created a need for a new organizational structure which tried to list every known thing in the world under a few different categories. The “owning” of information has always been used as a mark of the upper class, historically, even really unintelligent members of the ruling classes had extensive libraries to show their rivals that they were “learned men”; and so up until fairly recently having a set of encyclopedias was something that you tried to discreetly display in your home as a status symbol. One of the figures we talked about was Richard Stalman and his four freedoms of software: Freedom to run it for any purpose, To study how the program works, Freedom to redistribute copies, and Freedom to improve the program and release improvements to the public. He believes that all information should be free and open to anyone who wishes to access it, and while I agree, I also don’t really think it’s entirely realistic in our current society. While a lot of our information is free, there are definitely many pieces of information that are not, and whoever has them either will not give them up, or will not give them up without a price.