Paper: Rosenzweig, R. (2006). Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past (Links to an external site.). Journal of American History, 93(1), 117–146.
Discussion leader: Md Momen Bhuiyan:
Summary:
This article summarizes the history of Wikipedia along with its importance as a source for historical reference. The author first points out how Wikipedia is different than the traditional work which largely consists of singly authored work. On the other hand Wikipedia articles are written by the general public with very few restrictions. Wikipedia also differs from traditional work as it is completely opensource with the only restriction that the part that is copied can’t be imposed any more restrictions. This article four topics about Wikipedia: the history of its development, how it works, how good is the historical writing, and what are the potential implications for the professional community.
Wikipedia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in January 2001 as an open encyclopedia. They built another encyclopedia moderated by experts in March 2000 named Nupedia which had little success. They started Wikipedia as a new approach as well as in hope that the contributors there will also contribute at Nupedia. Quickly the number of articles in Wikipedia grew. But Sanger didn’t see this success as he left due to his concern about tolerance of trolls, which the author characterizes as ‘difficult people’.
Initially, Wikipedia started with no rules. Over the time it had to set some rules to minimize difficult outcomes. Now Wikipedia has a large set of rules. But those rules can be summarized in four key policies. The first policy is its goal as an encyclopedia and nothing beyond that. So it excludes work that is personal or critical or original research. This goal is coherent with what can be accomplished by a large group. But it also puts the same weight on the work of an expert and a non-expert which lead to the departure of Sanger from the organization. The second point is that articles should be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV). This point describes Wikipedia’s stance as a third party who doesn’t take any side. But it is not always achieved for a topic even after huge discussion. The third policy is that “don’t infringe copyrights”. It also comes with the licensing term for the Wikipedia content known as GNU Free Documentation License(GFDL). Some scholars argued that the imperfect resource that is “free” to be used in any way can be more valuable than a gated resource that is better in quality. The final policy is that “respect other contributors”. Initially, wikipedia got by having a minimal set of rules. But gradually Wikipedia added rules for banning to work with difficult people. It also set structure for the administration. Considering the growth of Wikipedia, all of these has worked quite well.
The history articles in Wikipedia have various nuances. From historians point of view, articles could be viewed as incomplete and inaccurate with bland prose style. Articles also have structural issue as well as inconsistent attention to details. The author thought that the part of the problem was that people write only about things that are interesting to them. To compare the contributions in popular articles in Wikipedia with other encyclopedias, the author analyzed 25 articles related to biography from Wikipedia with Encarta and American National Biography Online. Overall, Wikipedia lags behind American National Biography Online but is comparable to Encarta. It was surprising that Wikipedia had people write large documents with reliable information. Another thing the author note is that “geek culture” has shaped the articles in Wikipedia. So there are many articles about games or science but there are not many about art, history or literature. The author found only 4 errors in 25 article with minor detail issue. One problem with people is that their writing style varies which is reflected in Wikipedia articles. Due to the NPOV policy it is hard to find any specific stance in Wikipedia. Generally the bias in an article favors the subject. At the same time collective contribution avoid controversial stand of all kinds. Vandilsm in Wikipedia articles can be erased quite easily and quickly compared to other sites. Still some of the controversy for vandalism lead Wikipedia to impose rule for registering before editing an article.
Due to the open access students are using Wikipedia as an information source regularly. Search result from wikipedia comes up at top in most search engines. Due to the large volume of the content in Wikipedia it is bound to have wrong information. To solve this problem teachers can teach thier student not to rely heavily on Wikipedia sources. Another solution is to emulate Wikipedia like democracy in content sharing and provide free resources from high quality sources. Wikipedia has many rules that are very conventional like academic lessons. So it is easier to fit there as an academic. This leads to the solution that more historians should contribute there. But they still have to worry about dealing with the original research issue and collaborating with difficult people. General problem with history in wikipedia is that it popular history rather than professional. Finally the author points to the law of large number. People in group can be as effective as an expert. So it is applicable in creating collaborative history books.
Reflection:
This article gave a good brief for Wikipedia from historical point of view. Wikipedia doesn’t seem to be attractive for professional contribution. But It can always be used as initial reference point. Authors suggestion about creating history by collaborative work seemed interesting. I haven’t heard about any such effort yet. While there is merit in such effort, at the same time it disregards authors point of view which might useful for some reader. It will be interesting to see how the policies changed after 2006. Author’s use of biography for comparision was ineteresting. But I would have wanted judgement from several people for those comparison. Finally, there has been no changes on IP rights on any business model given the amount of free resources has increased. So there might be some use to have both free and commercial resources.
Questions:
1. How would you design a collaborative work on history for any particular topic?
2. Is it possible to design micro task for this type of work? How do you apply law of large number in those tasks?
3. How do you make history interesting?
4. Do you think misinformation is Wikipedia has any real repurcussion for students?
5. Do you think giving extra privilege to expert could be useful?
