News, Views and Careers for All of Higher Education
June 14, 2006
A Wiki Situation
To wiki or not to wiki? That is the question.
Related stories
- Critical Mass, April 25
- The Eternal Sophomore, April 18
- You Hide, They Seek, Nov. 15
- The Quest for Crossover Books, May 22, 2006
- Plain Talk About Plain Speech, March 3, 2006
Whether ‘tis nobler to plunge in and write a few Wikipedia entries on subjects regarding which one has some expertise; and also, p’raps, to revise some of the weaker articles already available there...
Or rather, taking arms against a sea of mediocrity, to mock the whole concept of an open-source, online encyclopedia — that bastard spawn of “American Idol” and a sixth grader’s report copied word-for-word from the World Book....
Hamlet, of course, was nothing if not ambivalent –- and my attitude towards how to deal with Wikipedia is comparably indecisive. Six years into its existence, there are now something in the neighborhood of 2 million entries, in various languages, ranging in length from one sentence to thousands of words.
They are prepared and edited by an ad hoc community of contributors. There is no definitive iteration of a Wikipedia article: It can be added to, revised, or completely rewritten by anyone who cares to take the time.
Strictly speaking, not all wiki pages are Wikipedia entries. As this useful item explains, a wiki is a generic term applying to a Web page format that is more or less open to interaction and revision. In some cases, access to the page is limited to the members of a wiki community. With Wikipedia, only a very modest level of control is exercised by administrators. The result is a wiki-based reference tool that is open to writers putting forward truth, falsehood, and all the shades of gray in between.
In other words, each entry is just as trustworthy as whoever last worked on it. And because items are unsigned, the very notion of accountability is digitized out of existence.
Yet Wikipedia now seems even more unavoidable than it is unreliable. Do a search for any given subject, and chances are good that one or more Wikipedia articles will be among the top results you get back.
Nor is use of Wikipedia limited to people who lack other information resources. My own experience is probably more common than anyone would care to admit. I have a personal library of several thousand volumes (including a range of both generalist and specialist reference books) and live in a city that is home to at least to three universities with open-stack collections. And that’s not counting access to the Library of Congress.
The expression “data out the wazoo” may apply. Still, rare is the week when I don’t glance over at least half a dozen articles from Wikipedia. (As someone once said about the comic strip “Nancy,” reading it usually takes less time than deciding not to do so.)
Basic cognitive literacy includes the ability to evaluate the strengths and the limitations of any source of information. Wikipedia is usually worth consulting simply for the references at the end of an article — often with links to other online resources. Wikipedia is by no means a definitive reference work, but it’s not necessarily the worst place to start.
Not that everyone uses it that way, of course. Consider a recent discussion between a reference librarian and a staff member working for an important policy-making arm of the U.S. government. The librarian asked what information sources the staffer relied on most often for her work. Without hesitation, she answered: “Google and Wikipedia.” In fact, she seldom used anything else.
Coming from a junior-high student, this would be disappointing. From someone in a position of power, it is well beyond worrisome. But what is there to do about it? Apart, that is, from indulging in Menckenesque ruminations about the mule-like stupidity of the American booboisie?
Sure, we want our students, readers, and fellow citizens to become more astute in their use of the available tools for learning about the world. (Hope springs eternal!) But what is to be done in the meantime?
Given the situation at hand, what is the responsibility of people who do have some level of competence? Is there some obligation to prepare adequate Wikipedia entries?
Or is that a waste of time and effort? If so, what’s the alternative? Or is there one? Luddism is sometimes a temptation – but, as solutions go, not so practical.
I throw these questions out without having yet formulated a cohesive (let alone cogent) answer to any of them. At one level, it is a matter for personal judgment. An economic matter, even. You have to decide whether improving this one element of public life is a good use of your resources.
At the same time, it’s worth keeping in mind that Wikipedia is not just one more new gizmo arriving on the scene. It is not just another way to shrink the American attention span that much closer to the duration of a subatomic particle. How you relate to it (whether you chip in, or rail against it) is even, arguably, a matter of long-term historical consequence. For in a way, Wikipedia is now 70 years old.
It was in 1936 that H.G. Wells, during a lecture in London, began presenting the case for what he called a “world encyclopedia” – an international project to synthesize and make readily available the latest scientific and scholarly work in all fields. Copies would be made available all over the planet. To keep pace with the constant growth of knowledge, it would be revised and updated constantly. (An essay on the same theme that Wells published the following year is available online.)
A project on this scale would be too vast for publication in the old-fashioned format of the printed book. Besides, whole sections of the work would be rewritten frequently. And so Wells came up with an elegant solution. The world encyclopedia would be published and distributed using a technological development little-known to his readers: microfilm.
Okay, so there was that slight gap between the Wellsian conception and the Wikipedian consummation. But the ambition is quite similar — the creation of “the largest encyclopedia in history, both in terms of breadth and depth” (as the FAQ describes Wikipedia’s goal).
Yet there are differences that go beyond the delivery system. Wells believed in expertise. He had a firm faith in the value of exact knowledge, and saw an important role for the highly educated in creating the future. Indeed, that is something of an understatement: Wells had a penchant for creating utopian scenarios in which the best and the brightest organized themselves to take the reins of progress and guide human evolution to a new level.
Sometimes that vision took more or less salutary forms. After the first World War, he coined a once-famous saying that our future was a race between education and disaster. In other moods, he was prone to imagining the benefits of quasi-dictatorial rule by the gifted. What makes Wells a fascinating writer, rather than just a somewhat scary one, is that he also had a streak of fierce pessimism about whether his projections would work out. His final book, published a few months before his death in 1946, was a depressing little volume called The Mind at the End of Its Tether, which was a study in pure worry.
The title Wells gave to his encyclopedia project is revealing: when he pulled his various essays on the topic together into a book, he called it World Brain. The researchers and writers he imagined pooling their resources would be the faculty of a kind of super-university, with the globe as its campus. But it would do even more than that. The cooperative effort would effectively mean that humanity became a single gigantic organism — with a brain to match.
You don’t find any of Wells’s meritocracy at work in Wikipedia. There is no benchmark for quality. It is an intellectual equivalent of the Wild West, without the cows or the gold.
And yet, strangely enough, you find imagery very similar to that of Wells’s “world brain” emerging in some of the more enthusiastic claims for Wikipedia. As the computer scientist Jaron Lanier noted in a recent essay, there is now an emergent sensibility he calls “a new online collectivism” – one for which “something like a distinct kin to human consciousness is either about to appear any minute, or has already appeared.” (Lanier offers a sharp criticism of this outlook. See also the thoughtful responses to his essay assembled by John Brockman.)
From the “online collectivist’ perspective, the failings of any given Wikipedia entry are insignificant. “A core belief in the wiki world,” writes Lanier, “is that whatever problems exist in the wiki will be incrementally corrected as the process unfolds.”
The problem being, of course, that it does not always work out that way. In 2004, Robert McHenry, the former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica,pointed out that, even after 150 edits, the Wikipedia entry on Alexander Hamilton would earn a high school student a C at best.
“The earlier versions of the article,” he noted, “are better written over all, with fewer murky passages and sophomoric summaries.... The article has, in fact, been edited into mediocrity.”
It is not simply proof of the old adage that too many cooks will spoil the broth. “However closely a Wikipedia article may at some point in its life attain to reliability,” as McHenry puts it, “it is forever open to the uninformed or semiliterate meddler.”
The advantage of Wikipedia’s extreme openness is that people are able to produce fantastically thorough entries on topics far off the beaten path. The wiki format creates the necessary conditions for nerd utopia. As a fan of the new “reimagined” “Battlestar Galactica,” I cannot overstate my awe at the fan-generated Web site devoted to the show. Participants have created a sort of mini-encyclopedia covering all aspects of the program, with a degree of thoroughness and attention to accuracy matched by few entries at Wikipedia proper.
At the same time, Wikipedia is not necessarily less reliable than more prestigious reference works. A study appearing in the journal Nature found that Wikipedia entries on scientific topics were about as accurate as corresponding articles in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
And in any case, the preparation of reference works often resembles a sausage factory more than it does a research facility. As the British writer Joseph McCabe pointed out more than 50 years ago in a critique of the Columbia Encyclopedia, the usual procedure is less meritocratic than one might suppose. “A number of real experts are paid handsomely to write and sign lengthy articles on subjects of which they are masters,” noted McCabe, “and the bulk of the work is copied from earlier encyclopedias by a large number of penny-a-liners.”
Nobody writing for Wikipedia is “paid handsomely,” of course. For that matter, nobody is making a penny a line. The problems with it are admitted even by fans like David Shariatmadari, whose recent article on Wikipedia ended with an appeal to potential encyclopedists “to get your ideas together, get registered, and contribute.”
Well, okay ... maybe. I’ll think about it at least. There’s still something appealing about Wells’s vision of bringing people together “into a more and more conscious co-operating unity and a growing sense of their own dignity” – through a “common medium of expression” capable of “informing without pressure or propaganda, directing without tyranny.”
If only we could do this without all the semi-mystical globaloney (then and now) about the World Brain. It would also be encouraging if there were a way around certain problems — if, say, one could be sure that different dates wouldn’t be given for the year that Alexander Hamilton ended his term as Secretary of the Treasury.
Comments
If it’s broke, fix it
At least two of my historian colleagues have used Wikipedia as a writing assignment in their history courses, and in the Fall I will be experimenting with it myself. Their feedback suggests the students’ experience at critically evaluating the articles they read, identifying gaps, creating their own entries, coping with other’s edits, and dealing with the famous “Neutral Point of View” policy are all great learning moments. And in the long run may improve the availability of “starting point” articles.
Hugh Agnew, George Washington University, at 8:50 am EDT on June 14, 2006
Amen!
Well said Ira. If you have enough time on your hands to write a lengthy article about “what’s wrong with Wikipedia” then you have enough time on your hands to correct a few Wiki-entries. Wikipedia works best when people channel their energies into making it better, not complaining about declining literacy rates, inept teaching, diminishing attention spans, etc, etc, etc.
Phil, at 8:55 am EDT on June 14, 2006
Given the number of people who use it, I deem it worthwhile to take a minute and add a paragraph to entries on my area of expertise, which is representation of American Indians in children’s books.
For example, the pages on LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE and INDIAN IN THE CUPBOARD had nothing regarding portrayals of American Indians in those stories, so I added links to relevant on-line critiques.
Debbie Reese, Assistant Professor in American Indian Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, at 10:05 am EDT on June 14, 2006
Time
For me, the problem with Wikipedia is more temporal than moral. I’ll admit to writing a few new entries and overhauling a few others. Once you get into it, though, it becomes a time suck. Where to leave off? There is so much could be improved. Or added. And there’s only so much time in the day. I don’t see participation as a concession to the inanity of our times—indeed, crafting better pieces can produce the opposite feeling, a bit like yard work, a sense of having straightened something out—as much as the entrance into a giant vortex. I’m worried now that I’ve taken the plunge that it will be harder to avoid it in the future.
One little point not mentioned in McLemee’s interesting piece: I have vast admiration for the Wiki lovers’ ability to keep vandalism off the site. This is an endless and thankless task.
The problem of anonymity, by the way, is one that IHE is not immune from. These comment sections are, I suppose, a Wiki of sorts. And although they can generate thoughtful, interesting points, they too often invoke sniping, meanspirited, small-minded remarks — almost always from the anonymous. Authorship tends to encourage responsibility.
Christopher Phelps, Department of History at The Ohio State University, at 10:05 am EDT on June 14, 2006
Community cognition?
Ira, may I ask how much experience you’ve had contributing to Wikipedia? A search through the user pages for your name turns up no results.
The reason I’m asking is because it’s hard for this four-year contributor to Wikipedia to have any confidence whatsoever in the power of an aggregated public to detect reasonable-sounding nonsense. The Jaron Lanier article that Scott links to addresses the problem far better than I could — perhaps you’d be interested in reading it.
Ben Brumfield, Software Engineer at Austin, Texas, at 11:35 am EDT on June 14, 2006
Rumors
I heard a rumor of a graduate student in theology who edited the Wikipedia entry for a certain contemporary philosopher — not in order to correct or add anything, but solely to put in a link to his own review of one of the philosopher’s books. If this is the kind of shameful, self-promoting behavior we can expect from academic Wikipedians, perhaps it’d be best if they kept their nose out of it!
Adam Kotsko, Graduate Student at Chicago Theological Seminary, at 12:00 pm EDT on June 14, 2006
just do it!
I’m with those who think we ought to revise what we know to be wrong. While it may be a time suck, what isn’t if we aren’t careful? Reading Inside Higher Ed articles and responding to them can be a time suck if I don’t manage my time. Better to revise an errant wikipedia entry though I have to admit to having never done so. Still, were I to come across something glaringly wrong, I’d revise it, after I made sure I’m not wrong. For class projects, I’m trying to get my students to create entries for material that doesn’t yet exist. Wikepedia is, as others have also noted, a good place to start when looking to fill knowledge gaps, and a good exercise in writing for a real audience should students feel the desire to do so.
bradley bleck, instructor at Spokane Falls CC, at 12:30 pm EDT on June 14, 2006
Using Wiki to Teach
Wiki software is generally available at most universities but it is little used. At a major 25,000+ student university where I teach a course a year in retirement, I found that I was the first faculty member to set up a class Wiki on campus. The Wiki is a simple language with very few rules. Thus, it took only one hour of class time to teach students enough so they could use the systgem. In the first iteration this spring, students put their homework up on the Wiki so that everyone (not just the professor and the grader) could see everyone’s answers. It became a way of expanding the knowledge available to the student. The teaching possibilities are endless. Try it. It will expand what you can do in the classroom and even get you to understand both the joys and the limits of the Wikipedia and other publicly available Wikis.
Paul, at 1:05 pm EDT on June 14, 2006
Time, Tenure, & Public Scholarship
Thanks for posting that Paul. Does anyone else want to share their creative wiki-related teaching strategies? I’d like to build a wiki that can be used semester-to-semester, gaining in depth and breadth with each crop of students. This seems like a stellar way to show students the cumulative and community-based nature of scholarship.
I suspect Christopher spoke for many when he wrote about the time trade-offs with editing Wikipedia. For me, it’s definitely on my “post tenure” list, but I’m hoping that someday it’s seen as a form of “service” or public scholarship. Aside from the publish-or-perish reality, the other reality is that professors who engage with broader publics – write journalistic pieces or appear on TV – can raise suspicions that they’re doing all of this public stuff when they should be doing serious research for a narrow group of experts. Academic blogs can also raise suspicions (see Juan, Cole).
Also, for the above reason & other paranoias, untenured faculty might choose to post here anonymously. A recent NYT article on the growing use of Google searches in employee screening has only reinforced my personal choice on this matter. I think Christopher is right that anonymity breeds rudeness, but I think different standards (of anonymity, not politeness) could apply depending upon where one is at in their academic career. I think the boards here are above average in terms of politeness — except when it’s about David Horowitz or Ward Churchill!
Brian, Assistant Professor at Large Midwest U, at 3:55 pm EDT on June 14, 2006
Quick Responses
Ben... I’ve probably made 100 or 120 edits, mostly under an old email address, mostly minor corrections or additions, on things ranging from articles on cities I’ve lived in to areas of “professional expertise.” I’ve also thrown things up here, and on sites ranging from Guardian Travel on up and down. Sometimes under my own name (which does take a certain “screw it” attitude because, yes, I’m sure I’ve damaged some future employment opportunities, at least in the US), often anonymously.
As for using Wikis in class, its quite a wonderful thing. These can be “closed” (class-only) or public, but they allow active sharing of knowledge in a much more interesting way than discussion boards. Students seem to write differently for “publication” than they do when just “talking” online.
Ira Socol, Michigan State University, at 6:20 pm EDT on June 14, 2006
The Digital Universe will do it better
As a co-founder of Wikipedia, but who has long since abandoned it due to the recalcitrance of its managers to solve its problems, I would encourage you instead to get ready to contribute to the Digital Universe. It will be like Wikipedia, but run by genuine experts.
Larry Sanger, Director of Collaborative Projects at Digital Universe Foundation, at 9:10 pm EDT on June 14, 2006
Wiki’s Anonymous
” .. The problem of anonymity .. is one that IHE is not immune .. although they can generate .. interesting points, they too often invoke sniping .. Authorship tends to encourage responsibility.”
Of course. The tax-supported tenured are the high-and-mighty and the untenured should keep their ignorant yaps shut.
IMHO (still protected by the U.S. Constitution, BTW), what a load of bull. One could wonder what studies about pre-tenure comments by untenured faculty would say about today’s brave tenured faculty.
Well, the few studies that I’ve seen indicate the untenured faculty were usually (unusually?) mum — until tenure was received.
As Gomer Pyle would say, “well — sur-prise, sur-prise.”
BTW: does responsibility include a full, accurate listing of one’s institution?
A.D., Untenured, unbowed at Small U, at 8:10 am EDT on June 15, 2006
So accuracy matters then?
This is an excellent as it were ‘postmodernist’ reflexive take on your article of last week, Scott. Wot is truth, we all asked each other, brows furrowed in thought, and then a week later you follow up with a piece that simply takes for granted concepts such as accuracy and reliability. Very good, very droll, very nudge nudge.
“The result is a wiki-based reference tool that is open to writers putting forward truth, falsehood, and all the shades of gray in between. In other words, each entry is just as trustworthy as whoever last worked on it. And because items are unsigned, the very notion of accountability is digitized out of existence. Yet Wikipedia now seems even more unavoidable than it is unreliable...Basic cognitive literacy includes the ability to evaluate the strengths and the limitations of any source of information...Wikipedia is by no means a definitive reference work, but it’s not necessarily the worst place to start.”
See? Some entries are more trustworthy than others. Accountability matters. Reliability is a good quality for a reference work to have. Sources of information can have weaknesses as well as strengths. Some reference works are more definitive than others. These basic assumptions are part of the mundane but necessary view of truth that my co-author and I defend. Not, as so many commenters thought, some cosmic or Absolute or capital T version, merely the kind one needs in order to realize Wikipedia is not necessarily as reliable as other reference works. That version does matter. The government staffer who makes policy via Google and Wikipedia is a really good example of why.
Ophelia Benson, Editor at Butterflies and Wheels, at 12:50 pm EDT on June 15, 2006
Tower of Babel?
I’m with Ira on this one. I’ve read Lanier’s piece, and McLemee’s piece, both of which are more meandering and disorganized than your typical wikipedia entry. Of course, McLemee is gifted with the kind of deferential humor that makes him a great columnist, but it seems that Lanier’s real concern is the “collective’s” quest for the “meta.”
The problem with this, is that wiki is not the Tower of Babel, mainly because its so impermanent. It’s more like algea on the top of a pond: a roughly random, living, interconnection of independent pieces. And yes, it’s uself for a lot of things. And no, you can’t build a house on it.
Nathan Smith, at 6:30 pm EDT on June 15, 2006
On the quality of wiki: Wiki is my first stop for non-controversial topics outside my fields of interest. It’s also my first stop, unless it’s Google, for noncontroversial facts I’ve forgotten (e.g. birthdates) within my field of interest.
Recently I wanted to know what “arbitrage” was. I got a good-enough answer for my purposes. A little while back it was “economic rent". That’s controversial, but I found that out and got both definitions.
Not so good on Israel / Palestine. Not so good on, say, the difference between early and late Heidegger. But encyclopedias aren’t good on those kinds of questions either.
John Emerson, at 6:50 pm EDT on June 15, 2006
Ira wrote: “Fifth — for Godssakes, be a source of knowledge all you academics. If it is wrong on Wikipedia — fix it. And more than fix it, go to the discussion page (or create one) and explain what you fix, and why. You are teachers, are you not?”
Ira, I think the problem here is incentives. Academics are encouraged to produce and promote, are they not? They aren’t really encouraged to actually make their stuff *useful*. To be more specific, I wrote the Wikipedia article on The Brethren of Purity and their encyclopedia, and all my good information came from academic sources. But because academics are not encouraged to make their stuff useful (which often means disseminating their work to one and sundry), I had a hellacious time tracking down and getting their stuff- they were all proprietary materials, and they certainly had no interest in spreading their information around; their superiors and colleagues saw their work, and that was enough. Most annoyingly, they can’t even be bothered release under a somewhat Free license so others *can* disseminate their work for them! It’s a bit of a bind: most refuse to do the work of disseminating their results, but they equally refuse to let others pick up their slack, which is all the more frustrating when we have the sort of Internet infrastructure like Wikipedia or Wikicommons to facilitate exactly that.
maru dubshinki, at 5:00 am EDT on June 16, 2006
Comment: A Wiki Situation
I was recently exposed to the wiki concept, but from the perspective of this librarian, I find its use by students & researchers no different from using any web site, published article, or book for that matter.
The previous thread of entries by academes describes what we in the library science field refer to as “Information Literacy,” which is essentially the ability to critically analyze information sources for validity, reliability, timeliness, bias, and other factors. Librarians have specialized education in the evaluation of information of all types, and when they’re doing their jobs well on the reference desk, they regularly impart this knowledge to their users every time they help someone answer a question or locate a resource.
If you were to come to my medical library with a stack of papers from Google and Wikipedia about your gout, you might hear me say something like, “Did you know that the web site where you got this information from is put up by a drug company that sells a medication for gout? They’re likely to be biased toward having you take their medication rather than something less costly like changing your diet.” Or, “Did you know Wikipedia is written by amateurs, and/or, in some cases, persons with an agenda? Do you really want to base your treatment on a source that might be unreliable?” These pithy thought are usually followed by a sentence like, “Let me show you the XYZ database, which is considered by your doctor to be the “gold standard” in the field of medicine...”
This enjoyable article made the tedium of having to evaluate information seem like something new, but your librarian knows that this issue’s been around for centuries, that it isn’t going to go away any time soon, and that there’s already an antidote for it— information literacy education.FYI— there’s an entire Master-level profession out there that can help you and/or your students tackle this sticky wiki question. In the academic setting, librarians formally teach Information Literacy as part of their curriculum.
Send the next State Department official you see using Google and Wikipedia to the library. Your librarian will take it from there.
Donna Beales, MLIS, Librarian, at 8:45 am EDT on June 16, 2006
Beautiful
Thanks for illustrating my point, A.D.
Christopher Phelps, Department of History at The Ohio State University, at 9:45 am EDT on June 16, 2006
Really?
” .. Authorship tends to encourage responsibility.”
Does that include Mr. W.L. Churchill, sir?
Wiki this, all you want. You have not, cannot, and never will be able to show any significant difference between your position and other positions.
BTW: what about responsible identification of one’s institution? Where is OSU? OSU-Mansfield? OSU-Columbus? The OSU System HQ?
A.D., at 4:40 pm EDT on June 16, 2006
My hope in writing this column was that it would provoke an interesting discussion. Mission accomplished!
I have no idea what “deferential humor” could possibily mean, but am intrigued by the news that I possess it. And if you think THIS piece was meandering, Nathan, you’d best not read any Montaigne. That guy was just all over the map.
Scott McLemee, columnist at Inside Higher Ed, at 4:40 pm EDT on June 16, 2006
Wike until the cows come home
” .. Authorship tends to encourage responsibility.”
Like Mr. W.L. Churchill, sir?
Wiki, all you want. You have not, cannot, and never will be able to show any significant difference between your position and other positions.
BTW: what about responsible identification of one’s institution? Where is OSU? Mansfield? Columbus?
A.D., at 4:45 pm EDT on June 16, 2006
Where’d the Problematizers Go?
But seriously (I was in a jokey mood yesterday), I do like the way the epistemic issues raised by Wikipedia dovetail with the epistemic issues raised by Scott’s last column. But then I’m chronically interested in epistemic issues, so that’s no surprise.
But I do wonder why none of the people who can’t use words like evidence or right or truth without scare quotes got agitated by the forthright use of related words in this column. I’d have thought they’d be all in a lather to problematize concepts like ‘reliability’ and ‘expertise’ and ‘falsehood.’
Oh, look, I guess I’m still in a jokey mood.
Ophelia Benson, at 4:45 pm EDT on June 16, 2006
A Point that Didn’t Bear Repeating
Once is probably enough, A.D. Hitting the “submit” button multiple times must have been pretty satisfying, though.
The answer to your question, not that I can imagine anyone besides you actually caring, is that I am a member of The Ohio State University’s Department of History, which is university-wide. When I was hired, I gave a job talk in Columbus and a job talk in Mansfield. When I was tenured, I was tenured by the whole department and by the Mansfield campus. If and when I am promoted, same deal. Ohio State has a “one university” model. Regional campuses are heavily interlinked with the main campuses, all faculty are considered colleagues, and all faculty are held to the same standards of excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service, without distinction. I can vote on any decision made by the department and attend meetings in Columbus, and I can teach on the Columbus campus, if I elect. In short, there is no invidious distinction drawn of the kind you wish to draw. Nor is it improper for me to identify myself simply as affiliated with OSU. I vary that, depending on my inclination. Often I include the Mansfield specificity, when publishing in journals or in books, just to deflate the stupid prejudices of anyone who might presume that scholars on regional campuses are inferior. But it does not denote the same kind of relationship—an island cut adrift—that is found on many other regional campuses in university systems around the country. OSU is sui generis.
Upshot: Generally, when one is ignorant, it’s best not to fire scattershot.
And yes, the Churchills of this world are indeed held responsible because their name was affixed to what they wrote. It’s people like you who live with no consequences when they make grotesque errors of fact and judgment.
Christopher Phelps, Department of History at The Ohio State University, at 5:20 pm EDT on June 16, 2006
A Wiki Situation
Field matters a lot. In African history and other matters related to Africa, Wikipedia is simply atrocious. The volume of work needed is huge and fundamental. E.g. entries related to the idea of “Bantu” (a linguistic category) treat it both as a racial concept and as a single language. In other areas one will find info concerned with minutiae of European military interventions in the colonial era but very little about specific African individuals, peoples or places, never mind change over time.
Meanwhile the structure of making interventions in the Wikipedia is very far from transparent. I spent more time than I should have trying to work on the “Bantu” problem I just cited but couldn’t figure out how to get it where I wanted and didn’t have additional time to figure out how. I gave up.
Ignorance about Africa is rife in all corners of U.S. culture, which raises problems about information literacy. Reliable Africa information on the web is scarce. Even authoritative-seeming sources such as the CPB web-pages associated with a major PBS series on Africa for South Africa give a version of S.A. history that would have been used comfortably in Anglophone South African government schools for whites in the 1950s, for example. If students turn to other electronic sources to check Wikipedia, they will encounter much absence, bad information and an interesting degree of plagiarism between different general information sites. There is no comparison-based fulcrum for information literacy leverage for student judgment about the quality (or absence) of Wikipedia information, because the general quality is so bad.
Africa scholars have some blame in the state of affairs, but there are very powerful media incentives to reiteratively retail a narrow set of tropes, that were most wrong and prejudiced 50 or 100 years ago, and are laughably outdated in other ways now. About a decade or so ago I recall reading a NYTimes story by a new Africa reporter (at that time they had 4 for the whole continent, 47 countries + 6 island nations, including 1 for North Africa) in which the writer wrote seriously that life in a peasant village she had visited, I think it was in Somalia, had been virtually unchanged and cut off from the outside world until about five years previous to her arrival. It was idiotic. The area in question has been part of a Red Sea-Indian Ocean-Mediterranean world-economy since the days of Hellenism at the latest. It should have been obviously untrue about *any* human situation anyway. But she wrote it and her editor let it stand (the editors are a much bigger problem than the reporters I think, btw). Were they ignorant? Just didn’t care? Giving the readers what they wanted? It causes despair.
On Wikipedia, it is not a question of nibbling at the edges, but of filling huge vacuums & removing a great deal of misinformation in what is there. Most items are stubs, and there are a great many things for which there are not even those.
The only way I can think of to possibly begin to remedy the situation would be to try to organize a collective intervention by a bunch of people, maybe through H-Net or the African Studies Association. It might be worth doing. The upside is that maybe Wikipedia &/or other open source structures could add a tool in the struggle to overcome the media stake in serving their readers’ (& maybe editors’) needs for Africa placeholder myths.
But I’m not going to be the one to organize it. Maybe I would if I’d succeeded in making myself a regular academic career. But between my own personal limits, family-based lack of geographic mobility, and the restructuring of higher ed to dependence on adjuncts and t.a.s, I’m on my way out of the field. It feels feels lousy, but I feel defeated.
So, my advice to those who advise students or other information seekers — point out that Wikipedia is *VERY UNEVEN* — and use Africa as an example. The comparison to the Britannica used in the study on science info would have *EXTREMELY* different results for anything about Africa — not that Britannica is such great shakes, but Wikipedia is worse than worthless.
Chris Lowe, MPH grad student, independent African history scholar (Ph.D.) at Oregon Health & Science University, at 4:35 am EDT on June 19, 2006
Is the World One Big Wiki?
Ophelia – Could the pairing of the Scott articles point in a different direction? I think the Wiki phenomenon shows the collaborative nature of knowledge and knowing. Sociologists of science like Bruno Latour have been jumping up and down for decades about how the production of scientific knowledge is a social process created through group processes and negotiations. For instance, if a creationist submits an entry on pandas that asserts a divine explanation for their evolutionary history, panda experts will jump on it. The super panda experts will correct the minor mistakes and so on.
I think we both agree that there’s no Absolute Truth of Panda and I think we both agree on the importance of reliability and accuracy – and I think I can cling to those last two concepts provisionally, with all my social constructionist baggage, as long as I make the necessary qualifications. For, I can think of a wikipedia entry as historically accurate, but I know that there’s no time machine and I know that ultimately I’m relying on a community of historians and their interpretation(s) of a set of primary documents.
[Thanks for the Fuller reference in your other post. That’s a great example to think with. Amy Binder’s book Contentious Curricula has a good discussion of the creationist debates, how the different sides rhetorically framed the debate, and the institutional factors that influenced outcomes.]
[Christopher – I didn’t know that about the OSU system – thanks for taking a bizarre post and making lemonade]
Where does the term “scare quotes” come from? I use quotation marks in different non-traditional ways, but rarely to frighten someone. And finally, is it possible to put “scare quotes” in scare quotes?
Brian, Assistant Prof at Large Midwest U, at 6:20 pm EDT on June 19, 2006
Get to the FAIR lawyers first, Mr. Happy
” .. It’s people like you who live with no consequences when they make grotesque errors of fact and judgment.”
What bright and happy example of thinking in the field of 20th century history.
You’re so brilliant — why don’t you get the TENURED law professors and law schools in the FAIR case to publicly ID themselves?
I’m sure, with your bright, shiny words, you could get them to publicly ID themselves. You so smart!
And when you do that, Mr. Happy, I’ll seriously consider your words. Not a moment sooner, Herr Genius.
A.D., at 8:35 am EDT on June 20, 2006
Digital Maoism
Jason Lanier, a very interesting thinker and certainly our greatest dreadlocked thinker has an interesting take on wikis and related digital collectivism at: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html
From an introduction to the essay:
His problem is not with the unfolding experiment of the Wikipedia itself, but “the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it’s been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it’s now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn’t make it any less dangerous".
David, at 5:50 am EDT on June 29, 2006
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Educators (again) v Technology
This is not an unfair or bad summary of wikipedia and academia, but I want to make a few points.
First, the “edited into mediocrity” probably goes against the norm. The Nature article, and anyone with a game theory background, pointed/points out that the more a wiki article is used the more accurate it tends to become. Nature found the biggest accuracy problems in the least viewed/least edited articles — something I myself have discovered. Those of us who believe in “community cognition” see this as a plus. People have distributed expertise and the need for accurate information, and these things can work together.
Second, anyone who accepts single sourcing, starting in primary school, is a bad teacher giving bad assignments. There has never been anything wrong with starting with either the World Book or Wikipedia. Encyclopedias are what they are, starting points. If students didn’t learn to copy from the out-of-date, horrifically biased and inaccurate World Book on their primary school library shelf, they wouldn’t be copying from Wikipedia in a university.
Which leads to (third) — teaching students how to use reference sources. I say that Wikipedia is a great information source — it will help you do great searches — and it is never better than in areas of high-controversey where the fight (and usually direct sources) is detailed for you on the “discussion” pages. If that doesn’t lead your students to track other sources, yes, I’ll say it again, you are not doing your job as a teacher.
Fourth — here’s a big difference (again) between in-print and on-line. Freezing knowledge at a single moment is valuable to historians, certainly, but it is rarely good in most fields. A printed book with an inaccuracy is a source of false information “forever” — a wiki entry can be fixed in a split second. Facts that change are left out of print, but readily accurate on Wikipedia. Quick, send your students to the book shelves to look up the status of the Republic of Crna Gora. Will they come back with the right information?
Fifth — for Godssakes, be a source of knowledge all you academics. If it is wrong on Wikipedia — fix it. And more than fix it, go to the discussion page (or create one) and explain what you fix, and why. You are teachers, are you not?
Finally, teaching students how to use the wiki concept is another essential future skill that schools have chosen to ignore. Distributed knowledge systems pre-date books and will live on forever, and your students need to know how they work, when there are problems with them, how to negotiate those problems, etc., or they will not be very successful. If you don’t teach them, you have no right to complain when they use these uniquitous systems badly.
Ira Socol, Michigan State University, at 8:15 am EDT on June 14, 2006