Brittnay's Blog for "The Digital Past"

For this week, I watched Jon Udell’s video Heavy Metal Umlaut, which talked about how extensive editing can reshape content on Wikipedia using the article page “Heavy Metal Umlaut” as an example.  What I found most interesting is that the we view what Udell is doing on the Wikipedia page as he explains the increase of information gathered to semi-complete the page in “present day” (2005).  He pages through each revision pointing out interesting or significant points regarding the umlaut, while also commenting on various people’s editing techniques, such as “cleaning up” spam and unfortunate content from the page, and correcting wrong information in a matter of a few minutes.  (Udell shows that each new revision is documented by the time, day and date at the top of the page.  He also shows that on a separate page that the viewer can see a list of other users who edit the page.)  The initial page only contained a few sentences of information about the umlaut, and in a time period of a few years, the information increased to what could be considered semi-reliant, due to the dedication of  x amount of volunteers.