When Stupid Things Happen to Good Wikipedia Articles

Every teacher who has ever called on a student who had not done the reading will recognize the agonizing pattern here:



Palin is  campaigning on a family vacation along the east coast, visiting historic sites and waving the flag. Asked a direct question and with the cameras rolling, Palin suddenly suddenly realizes she has no idea what Paul Revere actually did to become an American hero. So she tries to fake her way through with the unprepared student's classic recipe of one-half facts that are wrong and one-half trumpeting what the student believes are the key themes of the course (or in this case the campaign). So we get "Revere warned the British . . . he rode a horse, yeah, horse . . . ummmm . . . the Second Amendment Rules!!!!" Up until Palin's gaffe, the classic film representation of the phenomena was from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure:



The clip of Palin stumbling through her answer went viral and has been on every political blog over the weekend. The interesting thing is how Palin supporters have fought back, trying to alter history to fit the statements of their candidate. Slate blogger Dave Weigel has a pretty good summary of the effort so far: Editing Wikipedia to Make Palin Right About Paul Revere. Apparently supporters of Palin have been busily editing the Wikipedia entry on Paul Revere to make it better fit Palin's version of events. You can scrape the article's revision history for examples if you are extremely patient but Weigel gives an example of the general approach of the pro-Palin edits with the following example, in which the (since deleted) pro-Palin changes are are underlined:

Via Boing Boing

Revere did not shout the phrase later attributed to him ("The British are coming!"), largely because the mission depended on secrecy and the countryside was filled with British army patrols; also, most colonial residents at the time considered themselves British as they were all legally British subjects.

Wikipedia is pretty hardy, and editors have been reverting (deleting) these politically-motivated changes as quickly as they are made. You can follow that process on the discussion page for the Revere article, where one weary editor posted "Sarah Palin's army needs to go away."

Wikipedia, Bound

Here is an interesting project!

On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography: This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

James Bridle's printed and bound Wikipedia article the Iraq War, with edits, is a fantastic visualization of how Wikipedia works when covering a contentious and ongoing topic. "For the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information," Bridle enthuses. "Everything should have a history button."

I have mixed feelings. Whatever the opinions of academics like myself, the cultural importance of Wikipedia is only growing. I think it is fair to say that it has become the first stop for basic factual information for most people in our culture--college undergraduates, journalists, professionals in all kinds of fields, and (rumor has it) even a few history professors. There is no use fighting it anymore. At the same time I suspect the genesis of Wikipedia articles is fairly mysterious to most users. Brindle's row of bound volumes illustrates the mutability of Wikipedia. It is shifting sand.

What Brindle doesn't do is offer any analysis of the forces that went into the 12,000 edits of the Iraq War article. It would be interesting to see someone mine the data. Are there spikes in the editing activity, and do they coincide with breaking events? Can the users be divided into categories or factions, and how do the factions seek to control the narrative? What has the role of the moderators been in shaping the article? This article points to some interesting possibilities for such research. As one of the commenters over at MetaFilter wrote, "I guess that's the difference between 'making an art project' and 'writing a book.'"

Bridle's talk which accompanied the project is available online, as are the slides. His blog, booktwo.org, featuring "literature, technology and book futurism" is wonderfully thoughtful and interesting.

Encarta is So 1999

Microsoft Encarta Dies After Long Battle With Wikipedia: "Microsoft delivered the coup de grace Monday to its dying Encarta encyclopedia, acknowledging what everyone else realized long ago: it just couldn’t compete with Wikipedia, a free, collaborative project that has become the leading encyclopedia on the Web."

Heck, I thought Encarta had folded shop years ago. I can hardly remember my last computer to come with Encarta--perhaps it was 7 or 8 years back? Even then it was never very useful--dull text and some illustrations with occasional animations. And you had to insert the Encarta CD into your machine to use the encyclopedia--it was always easier to open a browser and search online. A friend of mine wrote a lot of the first edition of Encarta and I even helped him a bit with the research when I was his grad student. I wonder how many hours of work are being abandoned with Encarta?

The Wikipedia War Over Obama's Inauguration

The Wikipedia War Over Obama's Inauguration: "Shortly before 11:00 a.m. EST on Tuesday, President-elect Barack Obama's motorcade sped along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, headed towards the Capitol. But Wikipedia couldn't wait." A fun article about a minor skirmish in the ongoing Wikipedia "edit wars," this one involving the status of Barack Obama. You can see the remains of the battle on the Wikipedia talk page for Barack Obama and the history page. This being Wikipedia, you can even view the very first Barack Obama page, created at 09:56 on July 28, 2004: "Barack Obama (born August 4, 1961) is a Democratic politician from Chicago, Illinois and only the third African-American to deliver a keynote address at a Democratic National Convention. A state legislator and law professor, Obama is currently running for the United States Senate from the State of Illinois, which would be the highest elected office he would hold thus far. If successful, Obama would be only the third African-American senator since Reconstruction. In Swahili, the name Obama means 'one who is led by God.'" Our president has had a very swift ascent!

Wikipedia is the elephant in the room in most discussions of digital history. We all know it is there and important but as professional historians we try to ignore it. You know that opinionated 19-year-old in your survey class, the one who is speaking up all the time, the guy with the loud voice who is always correcting you with some wrong historical information he learned on the internet last night? Well he is editing Wikipedia right now. For most teaching historians our approach to Wikipedia is to hope it goes away. (This is also our approach to Rate My Professor.)

Yet our students turn to Wikipedia as the information source of first resort, and we need to understand how it works. In my Public History course we recently read "The Charms of Wikipedia" by Nicholson Baker, a good and amusing introduction to the online encyclopedia. Personally I have no objection to students using Wikipedia exactly as they would any other encyclopedia--as a handy place to check basic facts and to begin research, but absolutely not an acceptable source of research for a college-level paper.

I actually assign some Wikipedia articles from time to time, such as Land Ordinance of 1785 and the related articles Northwest Ordinance, Public Land Survey System, and Northwest Territory. These articles are Wikipedia at its best, giving simple explanations of how the public lands of the United States were divided. It is important basic information in a class on Western History, but too often neglected in textbooks.

More problematic are the articles on controversial topics--Robert E. Lee, Zionism, or Leon Trotsky. The talk page on Trotsky warns users that "This is a controversial topic that may be under dispute." You think? "Please discuss substantial changes here before making them, making sure to supply full citations when adding information, and consider tagging or removing uncited/unciteable information," the warning continues. The talk and history pages of all three articles bear the shrapnel and bomb craters of full-scale edit wars, complete with multiple reversions and accusations of vandalism, personal invective, and banning of troublesome editors. For example on March 19, 2008 an anonymous user replaced the entire text of the Lee article with "I HATE HISTORY SOOOOOOOOOOO I WONT TELL YOU ANYTHING MUAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

At the end of the day Wikipedia becomes what most of it's users want it to be. So the article on Lee is generally admiring and minimizes and excuses his life-long support of slavery in a way that makes this historian uncomfortable.