CHNM Essays
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Saved by 25 people (-6 private), first by anonymouse user on 2006-08-13
- Pooya72 on 2009-04-10 - Tags wikipedia , opensource , history , digital media , digital scholarship
- Shermanemma on 2009-02-15 - Tags wikipedia , history , opensource
- Jmedved on 2008-08-05 - Tags wikipedia , history , opensource , pedagogy
- Jutecht on 2008-08-05 - Tags history , wikipedia
- Ruddercit on 2008-07-22 - Tags wikipedia , history , opensource , chnm , community , research
Public Sticky notes
History is a deeply individualistic craft. The singly authored work
is the standard for the profession;
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A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors
is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture.
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that describes the online encyclopedia known as
Wikipedia
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And it has no authors
in any conventional sense.
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In a few short years,
it has become perhaps the largest work of online historical writing, the
most widely read work of digital history, and the most important free
historical resource on the World Wide Web
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How
good is the historical writing? What are the potential implications for
our practice as scholars, teachers, and purveyors of the past to the
general public?
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“Wikipedia,”they declare first, “is an encyclopedia. Its goals
go no further.” Personal essays, dictionary entries, critical reviews,
“propaganda or advocacy,” and “original research” are excluded
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That denigration of expertise
contributed to Larry Sanger’s split from the project.
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he second key Wikipedian injunction is to “avoid bias.
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On the “Discussion” pages that
accompany every Wikipedia article, the number one topic of debate
is whether the article adheres to the npov. Sometimes, those debates
can go on at mind-numbing length, such as the literally hundreds of
pages devoted to an entry on the Armenian genocide that still carries a
warning that “the neutrality of this article is disputed.”13
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our
freedom both to rewrite Wikipedia entries and to manipulate them
for other purposes is thus arguably more profound than your ability to
read them “for free.”
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Wikipedia has created a
working community, but has it created a good historical resource?
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Are
Wikipedians good historians?
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ozens of standard topics—the Red Scare, the Ku Klux Klan, the
Harlem Renaissance, woman suffrage, the rise of radio, the emergence of
industrial unionism—go unmentioned. And he would grind his teeth over
the awkward prose and slack analysis (“the mood of the nation rejected
Wilson’s brand of internationalism”) and the sometimes confusing
structure (the paragraph on legislation passed in 1935 appears in the
section on Roosevelt’s second term).
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Part of the problem is that such broad synthetic writing is not
easily done collaboratively. Equally important, some articles do not
seem to have attracted much interest from Wikipedians.
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n coverage Wikipedia currently lags behind the comprehensive
American National Biography Online, which has 18,000 entries, but
exceeds the general-interest Encarta. Of a sample of 52 people
listed in American National Biography Online, Wikipedia
included one-half, but Encarta only about one-fifth. The
American National Biography Online profiles were also more
detailed, averaging about four times as many words as those in
Wikipedia. Encarta was the least detailed, with its
entries for the sample only about one-quarter the length of
Wikipedia’s.28
Yet what is most impressive is that Wikipedia has found unpaid
volunteers to write surprisingly detailed and reliable portraits of
relatively obscure historical figures—for example, 900 words on the
Union general Romeyn B. Ayres.
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uch bias has occasioned much discussion, including among
Wikipedians.
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Encyclopedia Britannica editor in chief Dale Hoiberg
defensively pointed out to the Guardian that “Wikipedia
authors write of things they’re interested in, and so many subjects
don’t get covered; and news events get covered in great detail. The
entry on Hurricane Frances is five times the length of that on Chinese
art, and the entry on the British television show Coronation Street is
twice as long as the article on Tony Blair.” (Wikipedians responded to
this criticism defensively, making the Blair entry 50 percent longer
than the one on the television show.) But the largest bias—at least in
the English-language version—favors Western culture (and
English-speaking nations), rather than geek or popular culture.30
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Wikipedia, then, beats Encarta but not American
National Biography Online in coverage and roughly matches
Encarta in accuracy. This general conclusion is supported by
studies comparing Wikipedia to other major encyclopedias.
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Thus, the free and open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia offers a
formidable challenge to the well-established and seemingly authoritative
Encyclopedia Britannica as well as to Microsoft’s newer and
well-regarded Encarta just as the free and open-source Linux
operating system now seriously challenges Microsoft’s Windows in the
server market. Not surprisingly, Encarta has been scrambling to
compete—both by making its content more generally available (you can get
free access by using the msn search engine) and by
inviting readers to propose edits to the content.
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f anything, the bias in Wikipedia articles favors the subject
at hand. “Articles tend to be whatever-centric,” they acknowledge in one
of their many self-critical commentaries.
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Overall, writing
is the Achilles’ heel of Wikipedia.
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Even so, few would turn to Encarta or the Encyclopedia
Britannica for good writing.
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Conversely, the worst-written entries are the newest and least
edited. As the “Replies to Common Objections” page explains:
“Wikipedia has a fair bit of well-meaning, but ill-informed and
amateurish work. In fact, we welcome it—an amateurish article to be
improved later is better than nothing.”
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ut
vandalism turns out to be less common than one would expect in a totally
open system.
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On
average, every article is on the watchlist of two accounts, and the
keepers of those lists often obsessively check them several times a day.
More generally, the sheer volume of edits—almost 100,000 per day—means
that entries, at least popular entries, come under almost constant
scrutiny.46
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One reason
professional historians need to pay attention to Wikipedia is
because our students do.
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rofessional historians have things to learn not only from the open
and democratic distribution model of Wikipedia but also from its
open and democratic production model.
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Thus, those who create Wikipedia’s articles and debate their
contents are involved in an astonishingly intense and widespread process
of democratic self-education.
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Wikipedia’s view of history is not only more anecdotal and
colorful than professional history, it is also—again like much popular
history—more factualist. That is reflected in the incessant arguing
about npov, but it can also
be seen in the obsession with list making.
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Finally, Wikipedian
history is presentist in a slightly different way from that of
professional history—where, for example, a conservative turn in the
polity leads us to reevaluate conservatism in the past. Rather,
Wikipedia entries often focus on topics that have ignited recent
public, not just professional, controversy. The topic of Lincoln’s
sexuality—not mentioned by McPherson—occupied so much of the
Wikipedia biography that in December 2004 a separate 1,160-word
entry was created that focuses on C. A. Tripp’s controversial,
then-recent book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. Th
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An account of Lincoln’s life that focuses on debates about his
sexuality and dwells on his birth date, nicknames, and assassination is
not “wrong,” but it is not the kind of brief account that a professional
historian such as McPherson would write.
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Even so, the
difficulties in implementing such a model for professional scholarship
are obvious. How would you deal with the interpretative disputes that
are at the heart of scholarly historical writing? How would we allocate
credit, which is so integral to professional culture? Could you get a
promotion based on having “contributed to” a collaborative project?
There are no easy solutions. But it is worth noting that contributors to
open-source software projects are not motivated simply by altruism.
Their reputations—and hence their attractiveness as employees—are often
greatly enhanced by participation in such projects. And we do reward
people for collaborative professional work such as service on an
editorial board. Nor are collaborative projects as free and frictionless
as their greatest enthusiasts like to maintain. There are significant
organizational costs—what the economists call “transaction costs”—to
creating and maintaining such projects. Someone has to pay for the
servers and the bandwidth and install and update the software.
Wikipedia would have never gotten off the ground without the
support of Wales and Bomis. More recently, it has launched fund-raising
campaigns to cover its substantial and growing expenses.
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Still, Wikipedia and Linux show that there are alternative
models to producing encyclopedias and software than the hierarchical,
commercial model represented by Bill Gates and Microsoft. And whether or
not historians consider alternative models for producing their own work,
they should pay closer attention to their erstwhile competitors at
Wikipedia than Microsoft devoted to worrying about an obscure
free and open-source operating system called Linux.
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Public Comment
on 2007-01-04 by jugoretz