Wikipedia – Grading and Growing an Article

Information submitted by Judy Jones
Wikipedia Article Grading System
Wikipedia Grow and Article

Checking the authority of information is essential if you are investigating topics.   Wikipedia articles are graded for authenticity, reliability and completeness.  The grade FA is featured article status, and is professional, and thorough, and is a source for encyclopedic information until new information becomes available.

Other categories are A(essentially complete), GA(well written, factual, broad, neutral and stable), B(suitably referenced, reasonable covers the topic and understandable), C (may have some gaps or missing elements), Start, Stub, Fl, List and non-standard grades.

There are 3,493 FA articles, 71, 049 B articles 84,136 C articles and over 2.9 million are not graded (and therefore, not reliable, but maybe still useful information).

Tip from Mel: Facebook…How to Guard Your Privacy.

Unbeknownst to many Facebook users their personal data is readily retrievable by many organizations and individuals.  To protect your personal data on Facebook you should make sure you are sharing and exposing to the public no more than you want to.  To help you configure your Facebook privacy settings, there is a web site at http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/ which can quickly and easily aid you in doing just that.  It only takes a few minutes and is not complicated.  In a few clicks you’ll be done.

–Mel Ellington

Tip from Jerry: FACEBOOK password thieves

New Password-Stealing Virus Targets Facebook

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=10130401

Found by Jerry Heere

Tip from Jerry: Free Software

Courtesy of a good friend, here is a great list of free programs.

–Jerry Heere.

Click here: Free_Programs

Mel’s Tips: 2 Firefox enhancements

FEBE is my most important add-on for the Firefox web browser.  It’s the first one I install after I install Firefox. What FEBE does is allow me to save and reinstall all my other Firefox add-ons, including extensions, bookmarks, passwords, themes, and various preferences. That saves me a lot of time. It’s also nice to know that I have all my customized and personalized browser settings backed up. FEBE is available at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2109.

My favorite tab enhancement add-on for Firefox is Tab Mix Plus.  It allows me to color and control my tabs in many great ways.  I explored many other tab customizing add-ons and Tab Mix Plus appears to have the best available features.  I especially like the ability to choose background and font colors for my tabs.  I use yellow for the tab that is displaying my current web page, green for tabs/web pages I have not looked at yet, and brown for tabs/web pages that I have displayed.  See the example below of my colored Firefox tabs. You will find it at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122

–Mel Ellington

Here: The Demo movie not shown at the VOCC

This is a demonstration of the importance of sound in a slide presentation.

Watch it all the way through, it’s short.

Handouts easier to find:

A new spot here for handouts

from the VOCC meetings, and

other documentary information

on things valuable to VOCC people:

Look down at the bottom of the right column

and you will find the document you seek.

Mels tips: Xmarks

One of my favorite Firefox add-ons is Xmarks.  Xmarks keeps bookmarks and passwords synchronized among my computers and the various browsers I use.  Before the advent of Xmarks it was a cumbersome process for me to keep bookmarks synchronized among my PCs and Macs, at home, at work, or while on the road. I have explored several related utilities and built-in browser functions over the years, but I haven’t found any that work better than Xmarks.  Xmarks synchronizes bookmarks and passwords between Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari; and on the Mac, PC, Linux and other computer platforms.  With XMarks I can choose to sync automatically or on demand, upload or download.  If I really screw up my bookmarks on one of my computers I can download and install the online backup within a few seconds.  It’s functional, fast, and free.

–Mel Ellington

Mel’s Tips: Any Wallpaper

My favorite free wallpaper (desktop picture) utility for Windows is Any Wallpaper.  It doesn’t do panoramas between triple monitors, as some do, but it does work very well with both single and dual monitors.  I can configure Any Wallpaper to select pictures from folders that contain my favorite pictures and it will display them on my desktop, either sequentially or at random, and at a specified time interval.

At Download.com there are over 160 free collections of wallpapers (desktop pictures). There are also many other web sites with free wallpapers. Use a search engine like Google or Bing to find them.

—Mel Ellington

Jerry’s Tips: Driving Course Online

For anyone who was not able to participate in the course offered at VO you can take the course online through AARP.  You DO NOT have to be an AARP member to take the course and you don’t have to join.Here is the link to sign up:

http://www.aarpdriversafety.org/