Historical Methods

Wikipedia Assignment

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) has become one of the main sources of historical information on the Internet. With almost 1.9 million articles in English (about 4 million overall), Wikipedia is also one of the largest compendium of knowledge on the planet. But what is the quality of that knowledge?

Wikipedia is an open-source, open-access project that allows anyone to create or edit entries. Wikipedians (as these tens of thousands of authors and editors argue) bring to the project the collective wisdom of the masses, as compared to the traditional encyclopedia that relies on the wisdom of experts in particular content areas. Thus, one entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica will be written by one, or maybe two or three, experts. A single entry in Wikipedia could have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of authors, all of whom are able to edit, add to, and delete from entries. Only the most controversial entries (Anarchism, George W. Bush, etc.) are locked by Wikipedia. Those wishing to change these entries must do so via a volunteer editor.

Does the ease with which Wikipedia entries are changed and the fact that they are written by non-experts mean that students and teachers should not use this resource? Recent studies in prestigious academic journals such as Nature indicate that the quality of the entries in Wikipedia rises to or near to the level of those in better known print encyclopedias.

This assignment is designed to give you a greater appreciation for the Wikipedia—how it works and what it means to have knowledge constructed communally. To do this, you must become a Wikipedian.

The assignment

Step 1: Select a historical event, person, invention, or idea that you are interested in that is in some way connected to Eastern Europe. See if it has already been written about in the Wikipedia. If so, read the existing entry and ask yourself what it says, what it doesn’t say, and what it links to (or doesn’t link to but should). If it does exist, you will be substantially editing the existing entry. If it does not, you will be creating a new entry on your topic. Here is an entry that I recently edited on the Donner Party. If you click the History tab on the screen and look for tkelly7, you’ll find my edits from last year.

Step 2: Create an account in Wikipedia so that other users can know it was you who created or edited information on the website. The link to create a new account is in the upper right corner of the main Wikipedia screen.

Step 3: To create a new article, follow this link.

Before you create the new article you need to think about the links you want to add to your article. If it doesn’t link to anything, other users are unlikely to find it. And, once you decide what it links to, you will need to go to those entries and add links to your entry, thereby embedding your entry in the larger web of Wikipedia links.

Step 4: Over the next ten weeks, you need to track what happens to your article. The history page is the main way you will do this, but there may also be some discussion of your article. Does anyone else edit it? If so, how does it change? Do other pages link to it? If so, which ones?

At the end of the ten weeks, write an essay of 500-800 words on what you learned about the construction of historical knowledge by (a) writing your entry and linking it to other entries and (b) by tracking what happened to your entry.