Topic change: Facebook

Since we did our presentation last week (woo! GO GROUP!), we decided to focus on the privacy of Facebook for our blog and Wikipedia update. For this reason, I went on to Wikipedia and looked up the search term: Facebook (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook). It was a super original idea, I tell you. From there, Wikipedia linked me to Criticism of Facebook (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook#Privacy_concerns).

Both of these articles had some interesting information. I found some of it interesting and somewhat questionable. The main page (search term: Facebook) had some information on the history of Facebook, including entries from Mark Zuckerberg's blog when he first founded the idea of an early version of Facebook. While it was certainly entertianing, I'm not sure if I completely find the information in it reliable, and want to look into the source further.

However, both of the articles presented some information on Facebook that I was previously unaware of. In particular, there were several instances of other software companies and even some of Mark Zuckerberg's old classmates at Harvard who had sued him, claiming that he had stolen the idea of Facebook from them. Each of these was interesting, but there was very little information on all of them.

Some information that was noticeably lacking from both of the articles was on the copyright policies of Facebook. As we learned in class, any picture posted on Facebook automatically becomes Facebook's property, co-owned with the person who posted it. None of this information is included on the site and is something that we could add to it in our own project.

Also, I know that recently there has been some additional contraversy surrounding pictures of breastfeeding on Facebook. There is only a small section, only a couple of sentences long, devoted to it on the Criticism of Facebook article. Because this is a recent event, I think that we could do some further research on the claims made against Facebook for this reason, citing some recent news articles.

Furthermore, neither page mentions much about Facebook outside of the country. There is a brief mentioning that it was banned in Syria and Iran, and that there was some conflict in Canada. Other than that, not many other viewpoints from outside the United States are expressed. This is also something we could fix about the Wikipedia article.

Finally, even though the Wikipedia: Facebook page should only be general knowledge, there is a negative tone about it, giving it a slight "anti-Facebook" slant to it. This bias is something that could be fixed by more favorable Facebook information. Or by changing some of the wording to make it look less "anti-Facebook."

Overall, the articles have a lot of information included within them. However, since Facebook is a popular website and people use it regularly and often criticize it for one reason or another, the presentation of the information on the Wikipedia pages is messy. A lot of information is repeated verbatum in multiple locations, making it redundant. I think the biggest job we can accomplish in our editing of the page would be just to clean up the language.