History 390 blog

The post this week is about something that we all have used at a point in our lives whether it was to randomly look up a fact, or for research purposes, though if you go back to grade school teachers hated for us to utilize this service. I’m talking about Wikipedia, the encyclopedia of information that is ever growing. I personally like the service as it carries a lot of good information. Many people will knock the fact that people can go in and edit the information, but there’s many benefits to that as well. Sure you will have someone who will change information for comedic purposes, but it doesn’t stay that way for long as you have many people who constantly edit the service. The great thing in my opinion about Wikipedia is that information stays up to date. If something happened 5 minutes ago, like a team winning the Super Bowl, it will be updated that quick. It’s a pretty amazing service to be honest, and we can start by thanking the creator of the modern encyclopedia in Denis Diderot. Not saying someone else couldn’t have came along and had the will to do what he did, but his will to want knowledge organized changed the game forever. Another person of mention is Richard Stallman who was an early hacker who came up with the four freedoms of software that were inspired by FDR’s four freedoms. Within it, one thing that stuck out that he said was that the idea of copyright didn’t exist in ancient times, in which he was saying that copyrighting limits the freedom of creating, restoring, and passing along information, and is a dangerous thing. I agree with his premise when it comes to the sharing of information because as new developments come out, the information should be able to be edited to make the information better. It also makes sense in doing anything creative to an extent, but as long as the person is alive, and has ties to an idea or product they created they should be able to benefit off of it since they created it, which of course is the rules according to the law (120 years for an intellectual property). Quick mention of the study of sound which to be honest when talking about it my attention wasn’t all the way there, but that’s besides the point. One thing I wanted to point out was it is pretty amazing how medieval cathedrals were designed to manage sound. At that time, as far as we know they weren’t knowledgeable in the study of sound since the study of sound happened around the late 19th early 20th century, and yet they knew how make the cathedral in a way where the sound would fill the room they way they wanted it to. That’s pretty amazing to me, but you have to figure that people knew how to do things even if they necessarily didn’t study the intricacies about it.