Clio Wired (History 696)

Maureen’s Comments on Wikipedia:

Somewhere along the line I missed out on Wikipedia and this week’s project was a unique experience. It was fun to re-edit the links about the Woking mosque’s connection to the Begum(s) of Bhopal and I found it an extremely easy process to add to the original entries. If I can do this, ANYONE can. And, once I realized how easy it was, I had equally interesting time thinking about how Wikipedia has created a site that could be both the worst and the best thing for teachers who want their students to seek out and research primary sources.

History and art history teachers expect their students to do their own research and to use primary sources. Obviously, as Roy Rosenzweig notes, this is not going to happen on the Wikipedia site and we need to consider how that challenges conventional historical research. In one of our earlier readings, Vernon Takeshita expressed his concerns about how consistent use of the Internet would “undermine…analytical thinking” of young students who do not seek out primary sources.

Takeshita’s ‘Web-phobia’ has been thoroughly challenged in our class discussions and through our continuing examination of, and research into, digital scholarship. Obviously, the Internet does provide web sites that challenge and educate students in history as well as in other academic pursuits. As we have clearly seen, sites like “Who Killed Willie Robertson” create opportunities for students to use primary source documents as evidence in order to try to solve problems.

However, Wikipedia does not provide primary source documents and, instead, it becomes a site of what Rosenzweig calls “reasonably accurate accounts” of important people, places and things. Is ‘reasonably accurate’ a good enough source? According to Rosenzweig, Wikipedia does a more than adequate job of providing accurate information. In fact, he argues that it is ‘surprisingly reliable’ in its American biographies. Thus, it could be an easily accessible site for students to do a quick paper on an artist without reading a biography or looking at works of art in order to understand that artist’s legacy. This could be a problem but the beauty of Wikipedia is that it also provides an incredible teaching tool for teachers and students.

The site’s ability to allow anyone to edit entries or to write new ones provides an opportunity for students to add on to existing entries on famous people, places or things, or to write an entirely new entry. And, in order to do either of these, students will have to have some knowledge in order to write an entry that will be retained on the site. Thus, it becomes possible for teachers to use Wikipedia as a scholarly site. Students can look for the ‘amateurish’ sites that need to improved upon or follow their own interests and create a new entry or edit an existing one. However, students would need to learn how to research, hopefully with primary sources documents, in order to create an entry that would stand the test of time, peer review by others.

Since the Web is not going to disappear, we need to make sure that what we do have and what students are using on the Web can be used to their advantage in learning as well as to our advantage in teaching. Wikipedia is a site that provides some interesting ways to make students think about history and how it is written and we need to use it to their advantage as well as ours.