On October 31st (Happy Halloween!!) we began class by learning about the WIN Tribe – whom I have never heard of before. WIN is an acronym for White, Indian, and Negro who were a mixed group of people living in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Following the WIN Tribe, Prof. O’Malley showed the classroom his great grandparents wedding certificate that stated their race as colored, although they really were “white”. It’s mind blowing to me that Prof. O’Malley could have been considered black in the state of Virginia because of his Irish heritage. You can thank this colored nonsense to Walker Plecker who would write to people if they had any percentage of black in them they could not attend white schools or socialize with white people because “it’s an awful thing”. I think it is more of an awful thing to have the audacity to tell people where they can and cannot attend school or whom they may gather around. The original Patrick O’Malley wedding certificate was white, so Plecker clearly refiled it. Class then shifted it’s focus to the Encyclopedia and how Dennis Detero made the first modern type of encyclopedia, which complied all knowledge we had in the world into a book that was 28 volumes (they were scholarly). Not only was knowledge gathered, but classified as well, people like Ben Franklin were featured in it. By the 20th century the encyclopedia became necessary and families signaled it as ambitious and cared about the knowledge and owned their own encyclopedia. Encyclopedia Britannica had scholarly knowledge and it was believed “you had authority” because of the encyclopedia. The main downside of the encyclopedia was that you had to buy a new one every 10 years because the articles would be updated as well as the information. It is fair to say that “information gets better when it’s more freely shared.” What I found most interesting was that there are 28 volumes, but only 26 letters in the alphabet so why did certain letters like ‘E’ which had 2 volumes have more information than others. Besides the importance of the encyclopedia we learned in this class how we should really thank Stallman and his 4 freedoms because he helped create LINUX which is the backbone of the internet and Andriod users should be thanking him as well (Team iPhone over here though). Also, special thanks to Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger who are the founder and cofounders of wiki, which is one of my favorite sites to use when I’m looking up something. To conclude, we wrapped up class discussing the importance crowd sourcing has to computing. The more people you have looking then less problems will occur.