User:Jamesj320/sandbox

Wikipedia 100 years ago and 100 years from now (Wiki Assignment 4)
I believe that Wikipedia 100 years ago would have been very different from now. The articles would have had information that was known at that time and I feel the content would be more specific with less information. Today everyone has access to the internet which means everyone has access to millions of different sources so we can find out more about any topic we wanted. 100 years ago, information was not so accessible so the people creating the wikipedia pages would be well knowledged in that subject. With everyone able to edit everything now, everyone feels like they are experts from reading other smaller articles that could have wrong information which could be brought to wikipedia. 100 years from now I feel like wikipedia would still be in the position it is today. There are always people writing nonsense on wikipedia pages and i feel like this will increase as more people realize they can come up with their own stories. I feel like wikipedia would turn into a suggestion page with everyone opinions about topics because editors would not be able to fix everyone mistakes quick enough, which is the main problem with wikipedia now and what makes it so unreliable. The only way wikipedia would get better is to have a machine checking for reliability as someone tries to change something therefore all of the information on wikipedia would be reliable.

Wikipedia 100 years ago and 100 years from now (civil engineering)
If civil engineerign was a topic on wikipedia 100 years ago its content would be much different. in the past 100 years we have developed new techniques and built many more projects. The characteristics of a good civil engineer has changed dramatically as well. The process to solve certain problems are now down through software programs so the proccesses would be much different. Another difference would be the people making the articles. Today anyone who has done a little bit of research on a project can write about civil engineering projects on wikipedia without having any civil engineering practice such as us, the students in class editing wikipedia articles as assignments. 100 years ago, regular people were not able to access the knowledge the regular person can today so back then the people making the rticles would be the people that worked on the project or have an understanding of the roles civil engineers play first hand. People like Eugene Grant would be writing the wikipedia articles on civil engineering topics along with other civil engineeers. 100 years from now I think wikipedia would be more machine based instead of human editors. THere will still be regular people making the articles but instead of finding if the information on wikipedia is reliable, a machine would edit out everything that can not be found in an already reliable source making wikipedia a bettere source to use for research.

Article Selection - (Wiki Assignment 5)
The article I will evaluate is Transportation Engineering. This article has good content but not all the content is backed by sources. The article mentions other articles and pages but they do not cite them. There also seems to be a lot of information that could potentially be added about each topic. The Topics are broken down into subsections but they do not have much information in them such as how it came about and some examples of people or projects associated with the subheadings.

(Wiki Assignment 7)
Transportation engineering or transport engineering is the application of technology and scientific principles to the planning, functional design, operation and management of facilities for any mode of transportation in order to provide for the safe, efficient, and comfortable movement of people and goods.

The planning aspects of transportation engineering relate to elements of urban planning, and involve technical forecasting decisions and political factors. Technical forecasting of passenger travel usually involves an urban transportation planning model, requiring the estimation of trip generation (number of purposeful trips), trip distribution (destination choice, where the traveler is going), mode choice (mode that is being taken), and route assignment (the streets or routes that are being used). More sophisticated forecasting can include other aspects of traveler decisions, including auto ownership, trip chaining (the decision to link individual trips together in a tour) and the choice of residential or business location (known as land use forecasting). Passenger trips are the focus of transportation engineering because they often represent the peak of demand on any transportation system. (Needs citations to know where he/she is getting the information)

A review of descriptions of the scope of various committees indicates that while facility planning and design continue to be the core of the transportation engineering field, such areas as operations planning, logistics, network analysis, financing, and policy analysis are also important, particularly to those working in highway and urban transportation. The National Council of Examiners for Engineering and Surveying (NCEES) list online the safety protocols, geometric design requirements, and signal timing. (Again needs to provide a citation for NCEES)