Wikipedia

Journal Entry 01/08/11 07:30 a. m.

            I got out of bed this morning and I don't feel right.  Suffering for too long now, the pain in my head won't go away.  It makes me soooooo mad when people say stuff like I'm some cripple, "Are you sure your o.k?, Can I help you sir you seem confused?"  That just pisses me off even more!  LEAVE ME ALONE DAMMIT!  I'm so pissed off right now, OMG!  You know what makes me wanna hurt somebody is that lady.  She is so messed up, I swear I am going to do something about it.  She don't care about me or anybody!  Makes it worse trying to understand her double talk.  She could care less about us getting help.  My mission today is to find out more about her on the computer.

Journal Entry 01/08/11 08:12 a. m.

          I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT!  She IS jacked up!  Now she's done!!!!  Wikipedia had it all!  It says there that her district has the highest illiteracy rate in Arizona!  I am so damn mad!  Just proves my point that she don't care.  It says she didn't want to sign off on the health care law!  Figures!  She doesn't care if I get any help.  It says that she said, "Mentally ill people need help but it's not up to the government to give it to them, they gotta seek it out on their own or suffer in silence".  I had to stop reading because I wanted to shoot the computer.  Thats IT!!  I'm done.  I heard enough, read enough, seen enough and now its time to ACT!  She thinks I SHOULD SUFFER!  Well now SHE IS GOING TO SUFFER!  I am making a LOUD statement TODAY!  Anybody tries to stop me I am taking them out! 

Goodbye Friends, please don't be mad at me, I am doing this for all of US!!!!!!

         

          TUCSON, Arizona (AP) — U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona was shot in the head Saturday when an assailant opened fire outside a grocery store during a meeting with constituents, killing at least five people and wounding several others in a rampage that rattled the nation (01/09/2011 Daily Times).

          Did psychopath Jared Lee Loughner get his “facts” from Wikipedia?   Did he misconstrue a completely unconfirmed anonymous posting as the license he was longing for to massacre 6 and injure 13?  Was Wikipedia's misinformation a pivotal piece of the puzzle defining the final fraction of a second before America was shocked by another horrific shooting?  We will never know.  On the day of Gabrielle Giffords attempted assassination there were over 81 changes to the Wikipedia page that chronicles her life.

  

          I had never used "Wikipedia" before.  The assignment to become a “contributor” solidified my commitment to never use it again.  I was very concerned about recklessly putting misinformation on any post.  Therefore I choose a topic where there was there was no life or death repercussions.  My Blackberry cell phone has frozen up and stopped working on several occasions.  I decided to “contribute” fictitious information on Wikipedia on how great the phone is even though it has problems.  I wrote that it was the best phone ever made with no reported problems or system failures.  As I sat back waiting for the Wikipedia wizards to clean up my mess it alarmed me how easy it was to put anything I wanted on there with no accountability whatsoever.  It took two days before anyone changed the obviously false information and deleted it. 

          Wikipedia is a melting pot for self prophesized prose to snare misguided cyber surfers turning them into victim’s of misrepresented information.  It is a reckless, wanton, uncontrolled media that has unlimited potential for disastrous consequences.  It should never be viewed as a credible source for information.  I don’t think it should be viewed at all.

Works Cited:

http://www.daily-times.com/ci_17043596

Wikipedia 2011-  Gabrielle Giffords

The Increased Need for Academic Integrity In the Digital Age

By: Lawrence M Luttrell

EDU-590 Cohort #6

         The blinding digital billboard adjacent the freeway changes frequently as you approach it.  Captian Morgans Rum, Fly Northwest Airlines, Charmin "the quicker picker upper", and then you see my picture, smiling with a seductive glare in my eye as I hold a copy of my new book titled "Everything You Needed To Know About...."   And that's all that you glean as you pass by at 80 miles an hour.  As your mind races through your confused memory you know something is very wrong.

          You immediately feel violated!  You know I have taken something from you, but for the life of you, you have no idea what it is!  You can't call the police for you have yet to figure out why?  You can't cry for you know not what you have lost.  You can't scream for no one will hear you as you drive down that lonely freeway of disparity.  You are in a state of panic and you're struggling to go into your happy place to regain a sense of safety and security.  You have become paralyzed in fear, unable to function and all you can think is "why do I know that jerk?!"

          Then you remember it was that "class" we had together in college.  The research you conducted on quantum physics!  You don't know it yet but I ripped it off from you in under a second!  The college had proudly published your hard work on the internet and after my Comcast blazing fast internet speed cut and paste, I "wrote" a best selling book about it and now I am on billboards across the country.

          Sound far fetched?  I struggled profoundly to purposely steal and capture relevant information off the backs of other writers to complete this assignment on plagiarism.  Relying solely on the internet for the theft I added a paragraph and changed some words here and there.  When I submitted it I expected to receive at best an 85 or above.  Apparently, I am a rock star according to "Safe Assign".  To my amazement I scored a 21 percent!  The programmers for Safe Assign should be sent back to "DOS" school.

          At this point "I" feel cheated.  I worked very hard for a few days looking for the right material to plagiarize worrying how difficult it would be changing a "Picasso" into a "Luttrell".  Had I known the ease of deception, I would have forgone the ethical labor over the theft and transitioned to plagiarization sooner!  The conversion of 90 percent "Picasso" into a 21 percent match rating was borderline on ignorant.  I expected a relentless fight from a program that produced flaccid results.   Many so called plagiarism detection services can only detect blatant word for word copies of text (Wikipedia 2011).

          Academic Integrity can't be effectively detected by computers.  It must be taught at home, in our schools, and at our places of employment.  It is not up to one source to ingrain the value of originality into our children and peers.  It is upon all of us to reinstitute ethical literary value into our society.  The internet vortex is sucking the originality out of this document I wrote and you read at this very moment!  "Safe Assign", really?  Let us have a moment of silence for "Academic Integrity", it has left the room and unless we do something, it will never come back.

Works Cited
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
Picture Source: adaptivedisplays.com