Wikipedia
This entry is going to be about examining two non-related articles on Wikipedia. The first article that I examined was on snowboarding. Overall it was an accurate article. There could have been much more information, but for the information that was provided it was all accurate. When reading I understood everything that had been written, but that's also because I snowboard and know all of the terminology. But if someone had no idea what it was, they might have trouble following some of the technical terminology. I think that today most of the earths population knows what snowboarding is, granted they may have never participated in the sport, but they know at least what it looks like. The article, for the most part, follows Widipedia's guidelines for the ideal article. The guidelines are: neutral, referenced, and encyclopedic, containing notable, verifiable knowledge. There was nothing written about how snowboarding is better than any other sport or that it was worse. There were references in some sections, but not all. And there was very little written that was opinion based. The article was very unbiased towards or against snowboarding.
If I were to change the article, I would add more specific information about each section. Each section, as is, has only a short amount of information written about the topic and had much room for expansion. I would also add some sort of term dictionary so that people that know less about the sport can look up terms that they don't know and find out what they mean to understand the article better.


The next article I reviewed was about my home town of Negaunee, Michigan. For the most part the article was fairly accurate. I'm not an expert on all of the history but from what I did know, it matched up with the article fairly well. I feel there was a lot of information that was left out and that could be put into the article to make it better. But for the most part the article covered the basis of what the city is about and how it came to be. The article somewhat followed the guidelines. Again the guide lines are: neutral, referenced, and encyclopedic, containing notable, verifiable knowledge. There were some things written that were bias towards Negaunee that makes me believe that a local resident wrote the article and not a historian from the area. The article did not have sources but it did have links to other sites related directly with Negaunee that you could check the information with. There was a lot of information that could be verified in the article but then again as I had mentioned earlier there was also some information that was bias and an obvious opinion of the author.
If I were to change the article in some way, I would go back through and re-write it using historical sites and texts. I would also add more detailed information, unlike the vague and brief synopsis of the city that was written in the article.

Walter Benjamin wrote an article called "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in which he writes about what is happening to art due to machines. At the time that Benjamin wrote the article, 1931, there was no such thing as photo shop, laptop computers, digital cameras, or digital camcorders.

In this day in age anyone can create digital things with a common household computer. When looked up in a dictionary, art is defined as -"The quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance". The definition states that the digital media that everyone can create can be considered art. I feel differently.

When someone paints a picture or creates a sculpture, the object and everything that it represents is in a whole, "art". When that picture is copied and reproduced from a machine or that sculpture is replicated it loses some of it's artistic appeal. The original objects themselves are "art", because someone created them with their bare hands from their own feelings and emotions. When it is reproduced it loses that, it loses it's aura. The painting or sculpture now embodies the beauty of piece, but loses the human aspect. The aspect that the piece of art was painstakingly created by someone. So the piece itself isn't art anymore, a painting is just a piece of paper, a sculpture is just a chunk of rock; the things and emotions and feelings that the piece of art represents has now become the "art".

It seems that in today's high tech world there are no "original paintings" so to speak. It jumps directly to the reproduction. When a song is recorded onto a computer it has no raw feeling to it. It can be copied countless times without any effort what so ever. So in this digital world art is what the music or video or whatever it may be embodies. The emotions that it is trying to convey to it's audience and the feelings that the maker had when making it. This is why digital things don't have an aura, or at least not nearly as much of one. They don't have the feeling of extraordinary human ability to create such beautiful pieces of art. I'm not saying that they don't have some sense of aura, but not as much as if you were to go to Paris and see the Venus de Milo. You get the sense of emotion and the human aspect of it, the aura.

And with all the technology of today there is question whether some things are art or not. A digital image itself, the bytes saved on a computer or memory card, is not art. If the image was of a lake at sunset; the picture printed out is not art, but the sun and the lake and the trees and the animals and everything together at that very moment is the art. The film or the space on the memory card is just the vessel to hold the art. A photo shopped is not an authentic image. It could be authentic because it is original to some extent. It's the only image of it's kind, but without an entirely separate image it wouldn't even exist. As defined on dictionary.com something authentic is -"not false or copied; genuine; real". The image is copied and not genuine. In terms of many years ago, photo shopping would be as if Vincent Van Gogh were to take the Mona Lisa and alter things slightly and claim it to be a new piece of art. Photo shopping is not an authentic image. Although it is not authentic it may be seen as art to the creator or to other people that see it as having a more than ordinary significance.