There was an interesting
story on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday about a historian (Timothy Messer-Kruse) who tried editing an article in Wikipedia, only to have his changes immediately reversed as soon as he made them. The article concerned the
Haymarket affair, when rioters at a labor demonstration in Chicago in 1866 tossed a bomb at police and several people were killed. Evidently Messer-Kruse found some evidence that the standard version of this event, as told in history textbooks, may not be entirely correct. He thinks his attempted revision of the Wikipedia entry was reversed for ideological reasons. The Haymarket affair has been an important part of labor history, and partisans of organized labor apparently did not approve of Messer-Kruse's version of events.
The NPR story mentions an interesting-looking book that I have not seen yet:
Weinberger, David
2012
Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room. Basic Books, New York.
The story brought mind my own encounter with this kind of ideological editing on Wikipedia, involving the entry for
City. I posted the following comment on the NPR site:
"This story points out the weakness of Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information. I am an archaeologist, an expert on ancient cities, and I used to work on Wikipedia entries within my domain of expertise to improve them and correct errors. But then I ran up against an ideological roadblock. Revered urban planner Jane Jacobs had claimed (against all fact) that early cities preceded agriculture. This is a silly error to an archaeologist, a no-brainer. There is not a single reputable archaeological work that supports Jacobs's view on this small point. But there is a cult of Jane Jacobs, and members believe that anything she said must be true. After having my corrections of this minor empirical error reversed several times by a cult-member, I gave up editing Wikipedia.
But Wikipedia has become a major reference source for millions of
people. Should I just turn my back and ignore it because of its obvious
scholarly problems? Or should I still try to work to improve it as I
can? Is this worth my time? Anything I add to Wikipedia (so long as I
avoid cults or ideological topics, I guess) will be read by many many
more people than read my scholarly books and articles. As a scholar, I
find this difficult territory to negotiate. Thanks for the interesting
story."
Also,
see my earlier post, where (at the end of the post) I suggest that "wrong information from amateurs is fine for Wikipedia, but not correct information from scholars."
There was an interesting story on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday about a historian (Timothy Messer-Kruse) who tried editing an article in Wikipedia, only to have his changes immediately reversed as soon as he made them. The article concerned the Haymarket affair, when rioters at a labor demonstration in Chicago in 1866 tossed a bomb at police and several people were killed. Evidently Messer-Kruse found some evidence that the standard version of this event, as told in history textbooks, may not be entirely correct. He thinks his attempted revision of the Wikipedia entry was reversed for ideological reasons. The Haymarket affair has been an important part of labor history, and partisans of organized labor apparently did not approve of Messer-Kruse's version of events.
10 comments:
When you tried to edit City, did you provide a source? You have to remember, nobody on Wikipedia knows who you are, or that you are who you say you are!
Yeah, I know the drill for Wikipedia entries. In fact, adding sources was one of the main things I used to do in editing various entries for archaeology and Mesoamerica.
I used to think contributing to Wikipedia was a way to make sure my students weren't reading complete fiction. However, my entries had a different result. In my course evaluations, some of my students accused ME of lifting material in my lectures from Wikipedia. So I've stopped contributing.
Interesting. That could lead to some great publicity - Professor X just parrots lectures from Wikipedia.
Yeah. I was surprised it didn't go the other way - Professor X posts her lectures on Wikipedia. Much better publicity than being accused of plagiarizing myself.
Wikipedia has a rule against contributing original research. As an academic, I've always thought that this basically meant it wasn't an ideal forum for the likes of us. The more expert we are on the topic, the more likely original research would run through anything we wrote...
But is our only job to do original research? Don't we also compile the work of others for our lit reviews, and synthesize bodies of work for outreach activities? Wouldn't it be nice if some of our work reached audiences that are one or two orders of magnitude larger than our normal academic audience?
I am thinking of turning things around and arguing FOR more engagement with Wikipedia (stay tuned.....).
I'm not unsympathetic to your position... I often see things on Wikipedia that I think are serious errors. However, we've had a model of general encyclopedias for well over a century now, where people who are officially deemed experts are the only ones who contribute. Wikipedia is, by contrast, a rather radical experiment in the democratization of knowledge. Anyone can edit it and it is completely free to use.
I often hear fellow academics complain about their experiences while editing Wikipedia. And the gist of their complaint is usually "but they didn't accord me greater authority than any other user, despite the fact that I'm prof. X of University Y and Serious Scholar in the study of topic Z." That, however, is what I gather to be the whole point of Wikipedia.
It's unique model seems to be the source of its success. If our own original research is not being widely read, that is our fault - not Wikipedia's. And I'm not sure academics trying to muscle in on a lay forum is the best response to our perceived lack of an audience.
Have you seen the current entry for City? It mentions Jane Jacobs's theory, but it doesn't seem to be the work of her fan club:
"Theorist Jane Jacobs claims [...] though offers no support for this theory. Jacobs does not lend her theory to any reasonably strict definition [...] suggestively or vaguely contrasts [...] this view, she suggests a fictitious scenario [...] "
@Laurent-
I had given up on that one. I think I posted a complaint on the talk page that errors were being re-posted after I removed them, and someone must have softened the Jacobs. BUT---If one is talking about the origins of cities, Jacobs' notion has NO PLACE in the discussion and should not even be mentioned. It was wrong in 1967 and it is wrong today. So why mention it AT ALL in an entry on cities? Maybe a discussion of it under Jane Jacobs's scholarship might be in order. So even though the current text is not strictly in error, it is biased and inappropriate. It only exists because of the Jane Jacobs cult, not because of any scholarly reason or justification.
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