Saturday, May 9, 2009

Wikipedia Searching

The first thing I noticed while searching Wikipedia was that there was no page entitled simply "Government Surveillance". One good project idea might be to create a small page on this topic, with a list of common surveillance techniques and links to appropriate pages and information.

Now, on to the searching: I first looked at results for the term "wiretapping", and while there was no page directly called Wiretapping or Wiretap, my search did directly transfer me to the page on Telephone Tapping.  This page appeared to be very complete in terms of US information, but there were a lot of missing citations in discussion of international wiretapping laws.  There could also be more mention of how wiretapping laws and technologies are implemented in other countries.

I next looked up the term "data mining".  This article was also very thorough in terms of information presented, but it was lacking in citations and variety of sources when trying to describe the actual process.  The background information was very well fleshed out and gave a lot of insight into the technological specifications, but the process and business application sections could use some more information and sources.

So, in short, since government surveillance is such a commonly discussed topic, it seems that we may not be able to add too much in the way of information, but definitely we can help with citations.