Testing Wikipedia
Several months ago I went on Wikipedia and changed Simon Bolivar into a communist by adding to the article on him that he was the "founder of the Second Venezuelan Worker's and Peasant's Commune." That change stayed up on Wikipedia for three weeks! I tried a bolder experiment a short time later by making Abraham Lincoln into a lapsed Catholic. That got corrected within five minutes by a fellow editor who wrote, "This is Abraham Lincoln president of the United States." The implication was hopefully not that a Catholic could never be president, but that I had mistaken Lincoln for some other Lincoln, an 18th-century clockmaker, perhaps.
I have since learned that I am not the only scholar testing the veracity of humanities articles at the online encyclopedia. Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, made several changes to Wikipedia articles - some plausible and hard to check, others rather ridiculous and easy to check. All of his additions were corrected by fellow editors withing three hours. Halavais is blogging about it at alex .halavais.net.
Read about Halavais and other Wikipedia issues at yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education in an article on Wikipedia by Brock Read. It goes into many of the issues that scholars and teachers are constantly discussing: the scholarly reliability or lack thereof, "digital Maoism", the quality of natural science articles vs. the problematic nature of humanities articles, the well-known case of John Saigenthaler, Jr., etc. It mentions two scholarly projects to grade Wikipedia articles. One finds these issues - and student over-reliance on Wikipedia - constantly discussed by teaching faculty and at history conferences.
I must admit I use Wikipedia. It is a great source of images and links and, sometimes, to get a good first impression of a topic. I also generate most of the traffic for my Sites of Memory webpage by posting back-links at Wikipedia. But I must be counted among the skeptics for other uses. Read my take on how to use and not use Wikipedia at hatlie.de.
I have since learned that I am not the only scholar testing the veracity of humanities articles at the online encyclopedia. Alexander M.C. Halavais, an assistant professor of communications at Quinnipiac University, made several changes to Wikipedia articles - some plausible and hard to check, others rather ridiculous and easy to check. All of his additions were corrected by fellow editors withing three hours. Halavais is blogging about it at alex .halavais.net.
Read about Halavais and other Wikipedia issues at yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education in an article on Wikipedia by Brock Read. It goes into many of the issues that scholars and teachers are constantly discussing: the scholarly reliability or lack thereof, "digital Maoism", the quality of natural science articles vs. the problematic nature of humanities articles, the well-known case of John Saigenthaler, Jr., etc. It mentions two scholarly projects to grade Wikipedia articles. One finds these issues - and student over-reliance on Wikipedia - constantly discussed by teaching faculty and at history conferences.
I must admit I use Wikipedia. It is a great source of images and links and, sometimes, to get a good first impression of a topic. I also generate most of the traffic for my Sites of Memory webpage by posting back-links at Wikipedia. But I must be counted among the skeptics for other uses. Read my take on how to use and not use Wikipedia at hatlie.de.
mhatlie - 28. Oct, 07:40 Topic: Academia http://hatlie.twoday.net/stories/2861465/
