The Reluctant Digital Historian: Week 9: Wikipedia

Wikipedia is like food: everyone has an opinion. Here are some questions based on our reading to help guide the discussion:

What attitudes toward Wikipedia have you encountered among historians?
What are the major issues about Wikipedia that you should be aware of when you use it?
Should students be allowed to use Wikipedia?
What kind of change did you make to Wikipedia, and what happened to the change?

Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (2006): 141–46

Is collaborating with others on historical work within your comfort zone? Why?
Why is authorship and credit so important to historians?
Is Wikipedia still as uneven about history as Rosenzweig described in 2006?
Does the general accuracy and breadth of coverage that Rosenzweig describes mean that you should trust Wikipedia?
Why is so much good historical scholarship locked behind paywalls?
Why does Rosenzweig argue that historians should contribute to Wikipedia?

Graham, “The Wikiblitz: A Wikipedia Editing Assignment in a First-Year Undergraduate Class,” Writing History in the Digital Age

Is Wikipedia really important enough to structure a major history class assignment around?
What did Graham ask his students to do, and why?
Why did the history majors not like Graham’s assignment?

Messer-Kruse, “The ‘Undue Weight’ of Truth on Wikipedia,” The Chronicle of Higher Education online, February 12, 2012, http://chronicle.com/article/The-Undue-Weight-of-Truth-on/130704/

Saxton, “Wikipedia and Women’s History: A Classroom Experience,” Writing History in the Digital Age

How are Wikipedia topics selected?
What kind of intellectual balance is represented in Wikipedia? How does that balance affect your view of its utility?
How did the structure of Saxton’s assignment compare with Graham’s?
How does social history fit into Wikipedia? What does the response to Saxton’s students tell us about the assumptions underpinning Wikipedia?

Seligman, “Teaching Wikipedia without Apologies,” Writing History in the Digital Age

What have your professors said to you about using encyclopedias for research?
What pedagogical goals do I describe for my undergraduate students?
What are the problems with NPOV?
Are you persuaded by my claim that argument is a central problem even in a source like Wikipedia?
I suggest that historians’ two greatest contributions to knowledge are interpretation and close scrutiny of primary sources, neither of which Wikipedia welcomes. I wonder if this makes our potential contributions to Wikipedia particularly problematic?

Wolff, “The Historian’s Craft, Popular Memory, and Wikipedia,” Writing History in the Digital Age

Wolff makes the general point that we have been discussing in class, that the Internet allows non-professionals to be historians. How should historians respond to this development?
Wikipedia talk page as a tool for seeing how people debate the significance of history.
Conflict of “authoritative secondary sources” vs. NPOV: how would professional historians work this out? Wikipedians? Why does controlling the argument on Wikipedia matter so much?
How is the idea of “interpretation” received in the non-professional American audience?
“Wikipedia serves as a people’s museum of knowledge, a living repository of all that matters, where the exhibits are written by ordinary folk, with nary an academic historian in sight.”

The Reluctant Digital Historian