This link has been bookmarked by 63 people . It was first bookmarked on 13 Aug 2006, by Joseph Ugoretz.
-
10 Feb 12
-
28 Sep 11
-
25 Aug 09
-
10 Apr 09
-
15 Feb 09
-
08 Jan 09
-
23 Nov 08
-
16 Nov 08
-
05 Aug 08
Justin MedvedDespite, or perhaps because of, this open-source mode of production and distribution, Wikipedia has become astonishingly widely read and cited. More than a million people a day visit the Wikipedia site. The Alexa traffic rankings put it at number 18, well
-
Jeff UtechtThis article was originally published in The Journal of American History Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46 and is reprinted here with permission.
-
22 Jul 08
-
09 Jul 08
-
25 Jun 08
-
30 May 08
Lisa SpiroA historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture. Yet, quite remarkably, that describes the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which contains 3 million articles (1 million of them in English). History is probably the category encompassing the largest number of articles. Wikipedia is entirely free. And that freedom includes not just the ability of anyone to read it (a freedom denied by the scholarly journals in, say, jstor, which requires an expensive institutional subscription) but also—more remarkably—their freedom to use it.
wikipedia opensource OPENACCESS digitalhistory digital_scholarship
-
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.
-
-
28 Mar 08
-
17 Dec 07
-
History is a deeply individualistic craft. The singly authored work is the standard for the profession;
-
A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture.
-
that describes the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia
-
And it has no authors in any conventional sense.
-
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
-
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?
-
“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
-
That denigration of expertise contributed to Larry Sanger’s split from the project.
-
he second key Wikipedian injunction is to “avoid bias.
-
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
-
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.”
-
The fourth pillar of Wikipedia wisdom is “respect other contributors.”18
-
Wikipedia has created a working community, but has it created a good historical resource?
-
Are Wikipedians good historians?
-
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).
-
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.
-
The comparison is unfair—both publications have had multimillion-dollar budgets—but it is still illuminating, and it sheds some favorable light on Wikipedia.27
-
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.
-
uch bias has occasioned much discussion, including among Wikipedians.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Overall, writing is the Achilles’ heel of Wikipedia.
-
Even so, few would turn to Encarta or the Encyclopedia Britannica for good writing.
-
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.”
-
ut vandalism turns out to be less common than one would expect in a totally open system.
-
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
-
One reason professional historians need to pay attention to Wikipedia is because our students do.
-
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.
-
Thus, those who create Wikipedia’s articles and debate their contents are involved in an astonishingly intense and widespread process of democratic self-education.
-
Should those who write history for a living join such popular history makers in writing history in Wikipedia? My own tentative answer is yes.63
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
-
06 Dec 07
-
04 Oct 07
-
28 Aug 07
-
13 Aug 07
-
26 Jun 07
Ruth SelmanCan History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past
-
12 May 07
-
07 May 07
-
23 Mar 07
-
20 Feb 07
-
28 Jan 07
Trebor ScholzBringing democracy to knowledge. Who is Wikipedia to tell me that George Washington had slaves?
-
17 Jan 07
Michel BauwensA historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture. Yet, quite remarkably, that describes the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which contains 3 million articles (1 million o
-
04 Jan 07
-
08 Dec 06
-
30 Nov 06
Ian Yorston"Wikipedia and the Future of the Past" Roy Rosenzweig. Originally published in The Journal of American History, June, 2006
-
29 Nov 06
-
05 Nov 06
-
26 Oct 06
haraldgrovenCan History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the by Past Roy Rosenzweig Originally published in The Journal of American History
Wikipedia opensource colloborativewriting Britannica EB history article WP fromDelicious
-
22 Oct 06
-
29 Sep 06
-
13 Sep 06
-
12 Sep 06
-
31 Aug 06
-
13 Aug 06
-
07 Aug 06
-
06 Aug 06
Sivasothi N.Originally published in June 2006 in The Journal of American History, 93 (1): 117-46.
-
16 Jul 06
-
07 Jul 06
-
03 Jul 06
addedentryTwo cultures: excellent discussion of Wikihistory's style from the point of view of a professional historian.
-
28 Jun 06
-
26 Jun 06
tho masEssay mit Thesen über Wikipedia.
Medienwissenschaf Politik Geschichte Kulturwissenschaft Computer _ Internet
-
24 Jun 06
-
23 Jun 06
-
Ratcatcher"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? "
Page Comments
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.