Life in the Network

I had trouble finding a wikipedia page about a topic that I knew well enough to add information that wasn't already there. In the end I wound up adding a little bit to two pages, one on a comedian I saw Saturday night named Zach Galifianakis, and one about the DW drum company. Both of my contributions were kind of small, b ut they haven't been changed as of yet. On the drum page I got into a discussion about whether or not the page should be merged with a page for one of its subsidiary drum making companies. When considering what to update the page with, I found myself being very concious about what to update, where it was coming from, and how it would affect how people who were trying to learn about the topic would view it. But I suppose with all the editors and people checking up on the pages anything that isn't supposed to be there wouldn't be there for long. On each page, I suppose I was doing some marketing. I think that's pretty much unavoidable when when entries exist for any products or entertainers. But I did notice that there was an entry not only for Burger King (which makes sense) but for several of their signature sandwiches, which I feel is going too far into marketing.
I found myself fairly interested in the Lanier article. While I had always wondered about the reliability of Wikipedia, I never really thought much on the fact that the site is just an aggregate of so many others. I wondered if he was making too much of the fact that there aren't any authors names on the site, but I really like what he said about the value of the internet being in connecting people, and that "If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots." (Lanier) It's important not to lose sight of what the internet is best for in the first place.