Week+9

Using the criteria of Transparency and Functionality in slides 8 and 9, do a media analysis of two major information sources (i.e. About.com, Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, MSN.ca etc).

Wikipedia’s internal search engine is very effective. If you type a very common word into the search engine, the results are categorized into locations, media and entertainment, businesses and organizations, etc. Wikipedia is also updated very frequently because it’s a user based site, anyone in the world who wants to edit and make changes can do so. On the other hand, public editing on Wikipedia often leads to grammatical and spelling errors, or even worse, information that is inaccurate or not true. Wikipedia does have links to other related sites at the bottom in their sources for people to check, however many of those links do not work and are not updated. Wikipedia is a good source to use to get a general introduction of a topic; however it should never be used as an academic source because its open to public editing and not all the information on there is accurate.
 * Wikipedia**

Yahoo Answers functions are similar to Wikipedia in that anyone can edit anything. However, the approach is a little different in that it is a question and answer site. Spelling and other grammatical errors occur frequently in Yahoo Answers because many people who use it are young children and teenagers who simply do not care about grammatical errors. In addition, many people who answer a question do not list any sources at all, while others write “personal experience” as their source, so the answers are not always reliable or valid. A function that Yahoo Answers has that Wikipedia does not have is feedback. On Yahoo Answers, the person who asked the question can rate the answers based on how helpful they are, this helps other people to ignore the bad answers and focus on reading the answers that were voted most helpful.
 * Yahoo Answers**