User:POI Group1/sandbox

Origin of the World Wide Web
Differentiating the World Wide Web from the Internet. Although the terms are often used interchangeably, the two are not one in the same. The Internet, said simply, is a network of networks with global reach and is the base infrastructure necessary to access the upper level of functionality and connectivity which allows the World Wide Web to exist (How Stuff Works).

In contrast to the Internet, the World Wide Web is a system used to connected across the Internet using hypertext, which Megan will go into more detail about later, to access information in various forms as they are stored across networks. What is revolutionary about the World Wide Web is that it introduced the connection of information within a single document, creating a web of interconnected information which is where it gets it’s name from (How Stuff Works, Harrison and Ogan).

Although the invention of the Internet really came about from brilliant minds building upon brilliant minds, the invention of the World Wide Web is typically attributed to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a computer scientist working for CERN in the late 1980s. Berners-Lee set out to solve the problem of information sharing, after having noticed that researchers were having difficulties sharing their findings. After a functioning prototype was developed in 1990 and introduced outside of CERN in 1991,  Berners-Lee and his team at CERN decided to make the technology freely available to others, after having noted the potential that it had to grow and fundamentally change the way in which we connected information (World Wide Web Foundation, Harrison and Ogan).

From these humble beginnings the World Wide Web was born, and the ways in which we connected information and to a larger extent with the world, was changed fundamentally. It makes you wonder if Berners-Lee could even begin to fathom how the world would change from his invention in less than 3 decades.

Hypertext
Now, I want all of you to imagine going online and finding that there are no links, no connections to other web pages, nothing. What would you do? For each new piece of information you wanted to find online, you would need to know, and type the exact url into your address bar.

Not so long ago, this is what people needed to do in order to find information online. In 1945 An article titled As We May Think was written by Vannevar Bush. This article outlined a hypothetical solution to this lack of connectivity between information. Bush wrote about a futuristic machine that he called a “Memex.” This hypothetical device was meant to connect pieces of information together so that pages could be recalled by simply tapping a button. Sound familiar? This was the first mention of HyperText as we know it today.

HyperText has a long, drawn out history, so we’re going to jump ahead to the 1980’s when Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Hypertext is what creates connections between web pages and gives the internet its web like shape. Berners-Lee defines HyperText as quote “a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information.”

In basic terms, HyperText are in text links that recall information from servers to the user’s browser. When you visualize these links connecting pages from all around the World Wide Web, you get a connected map of the pages that we can view online.

Wikipedia
What is important to understand about the development of world wide web and hypertext is that it allows for a ease of connection between people and information. This can be useful, in cases of collaboration for research projects, or can be harmful, being used to spread misinformation. What we found to be the greatest example of this connectivity is Wikipedia. Information is no longer gathered and compiled by only a select few, but is a culmination of the perception s and experience s of millions of people.

How does it work?
Wikipedia offers a way for a millions of people to connect and work together in creation of one of the world's most used information sources. To make the collaboration easier it uses a special type of web page called a wiki - which is just another way of saying that it lets users edit the pages directly using their web browser. This means in order to become an editor or contributor all one really needs is access to the web.

Wikipedia as connection:
It is the world's largest online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the culmination of the efforts of approximately thirty two million users, about one hundred and thirty thousand of which have made edits in the past thirty days, making nearly one billion edits to about five and a half million articles all interlinked and connected through the use of hypertext. Hopefully, this means that the information is trustworthy and accurate, but this is not always the case. Anyone from anywhere can connect and begin to modify and rearrange information, Just like how we have put together this pseudo-page. However, these changes are often quickly remedied when inaccurate or not backed up by sources by a team of admins and bots.

Wikipedia Game: https://thewikigame.com/
Where Wikipedia's true power lies is the ability to navigate between pages instantaneously to find out more about a relevant or interesting topic. To illustrate the connective power of hypertext there are several wikipedia games, but the basics of them entail using hyperlinks to navigate from one random article to some sort of end point article. While this may seem silly, it demonstrates exactly how through the connective power of hypertext we have instant and remote access to huge centralized databases of information useful for collaborative functions such as research.