OER week 5

This week we read about how Wikipedia works and about other Wiki projects.
It was very interesting to read about what happens “behind the scene”. I´ve wondered about this part – who controls the texts, checks for misinformation, controls vandalism and so on. I had no idea that it was so organized and structured “behind the scene”. It´s interesting to know that there are lots of people rely wanting to contribute and it also puts mental pressure to others to contribute – especially those working in fields of common interest and those with the knowledge to ad to prior information. It was also interesting that different countries have a bit different ways of operating. The process of deleting pages was quite interesting to! So reading the text and the article changed my view of the reliability of Wikipedia in a positive way.
About the Wikimedia projects:
Wikipedia is probably the only Wiki project I´ve heard about before. Interesting how structured and vast it has become in seven years. It is interesting that the content can be different according to language. I´ve used the English, Finnish and Swedish Wikipedia, often comparing content. The language list is very impressive. Wikibooks is something that seemed very interesting as well as the other Wiki projects. I like the way they are separated to different areas, and the projects seem very usable for school and school projects. Most kids are familiar with Wikipedia, but the rest is probably quite unfamiliar. As the knowledge of the projects spread and when schools (TEACHERS) rely get in to using OER, and overcome the fear of using information from these sites, they will play an important part in education in the future. The problem as I see it is that many teachers still lack experience in using computers and internet even if the students don´t – the teachers rely on their textbooks and traditional ways of teaching…