Wikipedia – History for the Masses?
Roy Rosenzweig’s article on Wikipedia and its place in the digital history realm was intriguing. His comparisons between Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias were enlightening as I would have thought Wikipedia entries would have been chock full of errors. And the fact that vandalism happens less often than one might expect surprised me. Most significantly, however, I thought it was very telling that because “experts carefully vetted” content on Wikipedia’s “predecessor” Nupedia, it only published 20 articles in its first year and a half of existence. That’s miniscule compared to Wikipedia whose format encourages just about anybody and everybody to contribute. After reading about the phenomenon of Wikipedia and its lack of association with professional historians, I believe historians will only analyze Wikipedia from a distance as a digital, cultural or social event in history rather than become active collaborators on the site.
My personal Wikipedia entry edits were minor, but I think they were important. As an undergrad I read a number of published diaries, letters, and memoirs by U.S. Army officers’ wives on the post-Civil War American frontier. On the page about Elizabeth Bacon Custer, widow of George Armstrong Custer and author of three memoirs of her life with him, I noticed the entry referred to her as both “Libby” and “Libbie.” As I think it’s important to be historically accurate (and consistent) about the spelling of her nickname, I changed all of the references to Libbie.
April 4th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Custer strikes again!
Did you know that a large part of Custer’s mythos was due to Libbie? The joke I heard from a National Park Service Employee was when they changed the name of the battlefield from Custer National Battlefield Park to its current name of Little BigHorn Battlefield…they got a big laugh when they realized the acronym for the site would be LiBi (Parks with one name they take the first four letters, if it has two names its the first two letters of the first two words or something like that). So her mark remains!
Anyway, I digress–I agree with your assessment on how historians will deal with Wikipedia in the future. To some extent it is a tool with many faces and many layers–and will be a challenge to untangle at a later date.