[books, technology] Wikipedia as History Part 2
Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past (Part 2)
Roy Rosenzweig
http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/42
June 2006
Why Should We Care? Implications for Historians
One reason professional historians need to pay attention to Wikipedia is because our students do. A student contributor to an online discussion about Wikipedia noted that he used the online encyclopedia to study the historical terms for a test on early romanticism in Britain. Other students routinely list it in term paper bibliographies. We should not view this prospect with undue alarm. Wikipedia for the most part gets its facts right. (The student of British culture reported that Wikipedia proved as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica and easier to use.) And the general panic about students’ use of Internet sources is overblown. You can find bad history in the library, and while much misinformation circulates on the Internet, it also helps to debunk myths and to correct misinformation.52
Yet, the ubiquity and ease of use of Wikipedia still pose important challenges for history teachers. Wikipedia can act as a megaphone, amplifying the (sometimes incorrect) conventional wisdom. As Wikinfo (a fork, or spin-off, from Wikipedia) explains: “A wiki with so many hundreds of thousands of pages is bound to get some things wrong. The problem is, that because Wikipedia has become the ‘aol’ [America Online] of the library and reference world, such false information and incorrect definitions of terms become multiple incompetences, propagated to millions of potential readers world-wide.” Not only does Wikipedia propagate misinformation but so do those who appropriate its content, as they are entitled to do under the gfdl. As a result, as the blogger John Morse observed, “when you search Google for some obscure term that Wikipedia knows about, you might get two dozen results that all say the same thing-seemingly authoritative until you realize they all spread from a snapshot of Wiki-one that is now severed from the context of editability and might seem more creditable than it really is.” The Web site Answers.com, which promises to provide “quick, integrated reference answers,” relies heavily on Wikipedia for those answers. And Google, which already puts Wikipedia results high in its rankings, now sends people looking for “definitions” to Answers.com. Can you hear the sound of one hand clapping?53
Wikipedia’s ease of use and its tendency to show up at the top of Google rankings in turn reinforce students’ propensity to latch on to the first source they encounter rather than to weigh multiple sources of information. Teachers have little more to fear from students’ starting with Wikipedia than from their starting with most other basic reference sources. They have a lot to fear if students stop there. To state the obvious: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias have intrinsic limits. Most readers of this journal have not relied heavily on encyclopedias since junior high school days. And most readers of this journal do not want their students to rely heavily on encyclopedias-digital or print, free or subscription, professionally written or amateur and collaborative-for research papers. One Wikipedia contributor noted that despite her “deep appreciation for it,” she still “roll[s her] eyes whenever students submit papers with Wikipedia as a citation.” “Any encyclopedia, of any kind,” wrote another observer, “is a horrible place to get the whole story on any subject.” Encyclopedias “give you the topline”; they are “the Reader’s Digest of deep knowledge.” Fifty years ago, the family encyclopedia provided this “rough and ready primer on some name or idea”; now that role is being played by the Internet and increasingly by Wikipedia.54
But should we blame Wikipedia for the appetite for predigested and prepared information or the tendency to believe that anything you read is true? That problem existed back in the days of the family encyclopedia. And one key solution remains the same: Spend more time teaching about the limitations of all information sources, including Wikipedia, and emphasizing the skills of critical analysis of primary and secondary sources.
Another solution is to emulate the great democratic triumph of Wikipedia-its demonstration that people are eager for free and accessible information resources. If historians believe that what is available free on the Web is low quality, then we have a responsibility to make better information sources available online. Why are so many of our scholarly journals locked away behind subscription gates? What about American National Biography Online-written by professional historians, sponsored by our scholarly societies, and supported by millions of dollars in foundation and government grants? Why is it available only to libraries that often pay thousands of dollars per year rather than to everyone on the Web as Wikipedia is? Shouldn’t professional historians join in the massive democratization of access to knowledge reflected by Wikipedia and the Web in general?55 American National Biography Online may be a significantly better historical resource than Wikipedia, but its impact is much smaller because it is available to so few people.
The limited audience for subscription-based historical resources such as American National Biography Online becomes an even larger issue when we move outside the borders of the United States and especially into poorer parts of the world, where such subscription fees pose major problems even for libraries. Moreover, in some of those places, where censorship of textbooks and other historical resources is common, the fact that Wikipedia’s freedom means both “free beer” and “free speech” has profound implications because it allows the circulation of alternative historical voices and narratives. Some repressive governments have responded by restricting access to Wikipedia. China, for example, currently prevents its citizens from reading the English- or Chinese-language versions of Wikipedia. And it is probably not a coincidence that the first blocking of Wikipedia in China began on the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.56
Professional historians have things to learn not only from the open and democratic distribution model of Wikipedia but also from its open and democratic production model. Although Wikipedia as a product is problematic as a sole source of information, the process of creating Wikipedia fosters an appreciation of the very skills that historians try to teach. Despite Wikipedia’s unconventionality in the production and distribution of knowledge, its epistemological approach-exemplified by the npov policy-is highly conventional, even old-fashioned. The guidelines and advice documents that Wikipedia offers its editors sound very much like the standard manuals offered in undergraduate history methods classes. Editors are enjoined, for example, to “cite the source” and to check their facts and reminded that “verifiability” is an “official policy” of Wikipedia. An article directed at those writing articles about history for Wikipedia explains (in the manner of a History 101 instructor) the difference between primary and secondary sources and also suggests helpfully that “the correct standard of material to generate encyclopedic entries about historical subjects are: 1. Peer reviewed journal articles from a journal of history; 2. Monographs written by historians (BA Hons (Hist), MA, PhD); 3. Primary sources.”57
Participants in the editing process also often learn a more complex lesson about history writing-namely that the “facts” of the past and the way those facts are arranged and reported are often highly contested. One Wikipedia guideline document reports with an air of discovery: “Although it doesn’t seem to be logical to worry about a Wikipedia article, people do battle over history and the way it is written all the time.” And such skirmishes break out all over Wikipedia. Each article contains a companion “Discussion” page, and on those pages, editors engage-often intensely-in what can only be called historiographic debate. Was Woodrow Wilson a racist? Did the New Deal resolve the problems of the Great Depression? Sometimes relatively narrow issues are debated (for example, William Jennings Bryan’s role in the passage of the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee) that open up much broader issues (for example, the sources of antievolution sentiment in the 1920s).58
Was John Brown a murderer? On this portion of the discussion page for the article on John Brown, Wikipedians debate whether to use "killed" or "murdered" to refer to his actions and which word accords with the encyclopedia's neutral-point-of-view policy. For Wikipedia's thousands of contributors, such discussions are a form of popular historiographic debate. http ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:John_Brown_(abolitionist)/ (March 8, 2006).
Wikipedia has even developed its own form of peer review in its debates on whether articles deserve “featured article” status. Those aspiring to have their articles receive that status-given to the best .1 percent of articles as judged by such criteria as completeness, factual accuracy, and good writing-are encouraged to request “peer review” in order to “expose articles to closer scrutiny than they might otherwise receive.”59 Then further public debate decides whether Wikipedians agree on awarding featured article status.
Thus, those who create Wikipedia’s articles and debate their contents are involved in an astonishingly intense and widespread process of democratic self-education. Wikipedia, observes one Wikipedia activist, “teaches both contributors and the readers. By empowering contributors to inform others, it gives them incentive to learn how to do so effectively, and how to write well and neutrally.” The classicist James O’Donnell has argued that the benefit of Wikipedia may be greater for its active participants than for its readers: “A community that finds a way to talk in this way is creating education and online discourse at a higher level.”60
My colleagues at the Center for History and New Media interviewed people who regularly contribute to history articles on Wikipedia, and a passion for self-education comes through in numerous interviews. A Canadian contributor, James Willys Rosenzweig (no relation), observed that his “involvement in Wikipedia [is] a natural fit” because “I am interested in a broad variety of subjects, and I read for pleasure in as many fields as I can.” APWoolrich, a British contributor who left school at age sixteen and became an ardent self-taught industrial archeologist, answered the question “Why do I enjoy it?” with “It beats tv any day, in my view!”61
But APWoolrich is as enthusiastic about contributing to the education of others as to his own. Wikipedia, he told us, “accords with my personal philosophy of sharing knowledge, and it links me with the rest of humanity.” He believes we have a “duty” to share knowledge “without thought of reward.” “Wikipedia is the ‘Invisible College’ concept revived for the 21st century.” A blind high school student had a different reference point. “It is almost like playing a computer game but it is actually useful because it helps someone anywhere in the world get information that is uncluttered by junk,” he told us. “I think of myself as a teacher,” said Einar Kvaran, an uncredentialed “art historian without portfolio,” who spends about six hours a day writing articles about American art and sculpture. Like bloggers and amateur Web site developers, contributors to Wikipedia enjoy the opportunity to make their work public and to contribute to building the public space of the Web.62
Should those who write history for a living join such popular history makers in writing history in Wikipedia? My own tentative answer is yes.63 If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible. And if every member of the Organization of American Historians devoted just one day to improving the entries in her or his areas of expertise, it would not only significantly raise the quality of Wikipedia, it would also enhance popular historical literacy. Historians could similarly play a role by participating in the populist peer review process that certifies contributions as featured articles.
Still, my view is tempered by the recognition that the encounter between professional historians and amateur Wikipedians is likely to be rocky at times. That seems to have been particularly true in the early days of Wikipedia. Larry Sanger reported that some of earliest contributors were “academics and other highly-qualified people”-including two historians with Ph.D.s-who “were slowly worn down and driven away by having to deal with difficult people on the project.” “I feel that my integrity has been questioned,” the historian J. Hoffmann Kemp wrote in signing off in August 2002. “I’m too tired to play anymore.”64
Even Jimmy Wales, who has been more tolerant of “difficult people” than Sanger, complained about “an unfortunate tendency of disrespect for history as a professional discipline.” He saw the tendency reflected in historical entries that synthesize “work in a non-standard way” and “produce novel narratives and historical interpretations with citation to primary sources to back up their interpretation of events.” He noted that “some who completely understand why Wikipedia ought not create novel theories of physics by citing the results of experiments and so on and synthesizing them into something new, may fail to see how the same thing applies to history.”65
But the flip side of Wales’s respect for the historical discipline, as expressed in the ban on original research (and original interpretations), is that it seemingly limits professional historians’ role in Wikipedia. The “no original research policy” means that you cannot offer a startling new interpretation of Warren Harding based on newly uncovered sources. As a result, while Wikipedia officially “welcomes experts and academics,” it also warns that “such experts do not occupy a privileged position within Wikipedia. They should refer to themselves and their publications in the third person and write from a neutral point of view (npov). They must also cite publications, and may not use their unpublished knowledge as a source of information (which would be impossible to verify).”66
Even a comparison that focuses on the ban on original research understates the differences between professionals and amateurs. For one thing, historical expertise does not reside primarily in the possession of some set of obscure facts. It relies more often on a deep acquaintance with a wide variety of already published narratives and an ability to synthesize those narratives (and facts) coherently. It is considerably easier to craft a policy about “verifiability” or even “neutrality” than about “historical significance.” Professional historians might find an account accurate and fair but trivial; that is what some see as the difference between history and antiquarianism. Thus, the conflict between professionals and amateurs is not necessarily a simple one over whether people are doing good or bad history but a more complex (and more interesting) conflict about what kind of history is being done. Comparing the free Wikipedia and the costly and expensively produced American National Biography Online erects professional historical scholarship as a trans-historical and transcultural standard of history writing when we know that there are many ways of writing and talking about the past. What is particularly interesting and revealing about Wikipedia is its reflection of what we could call a “popular history poetics” that follows different rules from conventional professional scholarship.67
One noticeable difference is the affection for surprising, amusing, or curious details-something that Wikipedia shares with other forms of popular historical writing such as articles in American Heritage magazine. Consider some details that Wikipedians include in their Lincoln biography that do not make their way into McPherson’s profile: Lincoln’s sharing a birthday with Charles Darwin; his nicknames (the Rail Splitter is mentioned twice); his edict making Thanksgiving a national holiday; and the end of his bloodline with the death of Robert Beckwith in 1985. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia devotes five times as much space to Lincoln’s assassination as the longer American National Biography Online profile does.68 The same predilection for colorful details marks other portraits. We learn from the Harding biography that the socialist Norman Thomas was a paper boy for the Marion Daily Star (which Harding owned), that Harding reached the sublime degree as a Master Mason, and that Al Jolson and Mary Pickford came to Marion, Ohio, during the 1920 campaign for photo ops. It devotes two paragraphs to speculation about whether Harding had “Negro blood” and five paragraphs to his extramarital affairs. Meanwhile, key topics-domestic and foreign policies, the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921, immigration restriction, and naval treaties-are ignored or hurried over. We similarly learn that Woodrow Wilson belonged to Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and wrote his initials on the underside of a table in the Johns Hopkins University history department, but not about his law practice or his intellectual development at Princeton University.69
Wikipedia’s view of history is not only more anecdotal and colorful than professional history, it is also-again like much popular history-more factualist. That is reflected in the incessant arguing about npov, but it can also be seen in the obsession with list making. The profile of fdr leads you not just to a roll of all presidents but also to a list of every secretary of the interior, every chairman of the Democratic National Committee, every key event that happened on April 12 (when Roosevelt died), and every major birth in 1882 (when he was born). From the perspective of professional historians, the problem of Wikipedian history is not that it disregards the facts but that it elevates them above everything else and spends too much time and energy (in the manner of many collectors) on organizing those facts into categories and lists.
Finally, Wikipedian history is presentist in a slightly different way from that of professional history-where, for example, a conservative turn in the polity leads us to reevaluate conservatism in the past. Rather, Wikipedia entries often focus on topics that have ignited recent public, not just professional, controversy. The topic of Lincoln’s sexuality-not mentioned by McPherson-occupied so much of the Wikipedia biography that in December 2004 a separate 1,160-word entry was created that focuses on C. A. Tripp’s controversial, then-recent book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. The entry on the Spanish-American War examines in considerable detail whether the Maine was sunk by a mine (a subject in the news as the result of a 1998 National Geographic study) but pays no attention to the important (to professional historians) arguments of Kristin L. Hoganson’s book of the same year that “gender politics” provoked the war.70
That the latest article in National Geographic rather than the latest book from Yale University Press shapes Wikipedia entries reflects the fact that Wikipedia historians operate in a different world than historians employed in universities. Although Wikipedia enjoins its authors to “cite the source,” that policy is honored mainly in the breach-unlike in academic historical journals, where authors and editors obsess over proper and full citation. Moreover, the bibliographies offered after Wikipedia entries are often incomplete or out-of-date-a cardinal sin in professional history. Yet Wikipedians are mindful of a wider community of “historians.” It is just that for them the most important community is authors of other Wikipedia entries. And every article includes literally dozens of cross-references (links) to other Wikipedia articles.
An account of Lincoln’s life that focuses on debates about his sexuality and dwells on his birth date, nicknames, and assassination is not “wrong,” but it is not the kind of brief account that a professional historian such as McPherson would write. Professional historians who enter the terrain of Wikipedia will have an easy time correcting the year when the Supreme Court invalidated the nira but a much harder time eliminating Lincoln’s nicknames. Wikipedians would agree with professional historians that the Supreme Court decision happened on a particular day, but they might not agree that Lincoln’s nicknames are “unimportant” or “uninteresting.” And such historians will have to decide how much of their disciplinary “authority” they are prepared to “share” in this new public space.71
Although making people we generally view as our audience into our collaborators may prove unsettling, it will also be instructive. One history doctoral student at an Ivy League institution who has contributed actively to Wikipedia explained that “I use it primarily to practice writing for a non-academic audience, and as a way to solidify my understanding of topics (nothing helps one remember things like rewriting it).” He added, “I regard my Wikipedia contributions as informal and relatively anonymous, and use a much more casual demeanor than one would use in a professional setting (that is, I often tell people they don’t know what they’re talking about).”72 If Wikipedia teaches us (and our students) to speak more clearly to the public and to say more clearly what is on our minds, it will have a positive impact on academic culture.
But a much broader question about academic culture is whether the methods and approaches that have proven so successful in Wikipedia can also affect how scholarly work is produced, shared, and debated. Wikipedia embodies an optimistic view of community and collaboration that already informs the best of the academic enterprise. The sociologist Robert K. Merton talked about “the communism of the scientific ethos,” and communal sharing is an ideal that some historians hold and that many of our practices reflect, even while alternative, more individualistic and competitive, modes also thrive.73
Can the wiki way foster the collaborative creation of historical knowledge? One promising approach would leverage the volunteer labor of amateurs and enthusiasts to advance historical understanding. Historians have, of course, benefited from the labors of amateurs and volunteers. Think of the generations of local historians who have collected, preserved, and organized historical documents subsequently mined by professional historians. But the new technology of the Internet opens up the possibility of much more massive efforts relying on what the legal scholar Yochai Benkler has called “commons-based peer production.” The “central characteristic” of such production, wrote Benkler, “is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.” “Ubiquitous computer communications networks,” he argued, have brought about “a dramatic change in the scope, scale, and efficacy of peer production.”74 The most prominent recent example of such non-market-based peer production is free and open-source software. The Internet would now grind to a halt without such free and open-source resources as the operating system Linux, the Web server software Apache, the database MySql, and the programming language php.
Yet, as Benkler showed, the peer production of information is much broader than free software, and he offers Wikipedia as one notable example. Another-and one perhaps more relevant to professional historians-is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (nasa) Ames Clickworkers project, which encouraged volunteers to “mark craters on maps of Mars, classify craters that have already been marked, or search the landscape of Mars for ‘honeycomb’ terrain.” In six months, more than 85,000 people visited the site and made almost 2 million entries. An analysis of the markings found that “the automatically-computed consensus of a large number of clickworkers is virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars craters.”75
Probably the closest historical equivalent to the nasa clickworkers are the legions of volunteer genealogists who have been digitizing thousands of documents. For example, volunteers working for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints digitized the records of the 55 million people listed in the 1880 United States census and the 1881 Canadian census and made them available for free at the church’s FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service. Another volunteer effort, Project Gutenberg, has created an online repository of 15,000 e-texts of public domain books. Optical character recognition (ocr) software can relatively cheaply and automatically digitize print works, but it is generally only 95-99 percent accurate. To get a fully clean text is more expensive. Enter “distributed proofreaders”-a collaborative Web-based method of proofreading that breaks a work into individual pages to allow multiple proofreaders to work on the same book simultaneously. About half of the Project Gutenberg books have come out of this commons-based peer production.76
What if we organized a similar “distributed transcribers” to work on handwritten historical documents that otherwise will never be digitized? Volunteers could take their turns transcribing page images of the widely used Cameron Family Papers at the Southern Historical Collection that would be presented to them online. The same automated checking process used by Ames Clickworkers or among distributed proofreaders could be applied. A similar approach could be taken to transcribing the massive quantities of recorded sound-the Lyndon B. Johnson tapes, for example-that are enormously expensive to transcribe and cannot be rendered into text with current automated methods. Max J. Evans, the head of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, has recently proposed something similar. He called for a corps of “volunteer data extractors” who would index and describe archival collections that are currently only minimally processed. Such an approach, he argues, would take “advantage of organized, or self-selected and anonymous users who can work at home and in remote locations.”77
The barriers to success in such a project are more social than technological. Devising the systems to present the page images or tapes online is not so difficult. It is harder to create the interest to involve volunteers in such a project. But who would have thought that 85,000 people would volunteer to look for Mars craters or that 60,000 people would write and edit entries for Wikipedia? Of course, denizens of the Internet are likely to be more excited about searching through Mars craters than through nineteenth-century women’s diaries. Still, such projects have shown the ability, as Benkler wrote, to “capitalize on an enormous pool of underutilized intelligent human creativity and willingness to engage in intellectual effort.”78
If the Internet and the notion of commons-based peer production provide intriguing opportunities for mobilizing volunteer historical enthusiasm to produce a massive digital archive, what about mobilizing and coordinating the work of professional historians in that fashion? That so much professional historical work already relies on volunteer labor-the peer review of journal articles, the staffing of conference program committees-suggests that professionals are willing to give up significant amounts of their time to advance the historical enterprise. But are they also willing to take the further step of abandoning individual credit and individual ownership of intellectual property as do Wikipedia authors?
Could we, for example, write a collaborative U.S. history textbook that would be free to all our students? After all, there is massive overlap in content and interpretation among the more than two dozen college survey textbooks. Yet the commercial publishing system mandates that every new survey text start from scratch. An open-source textbook would not only be free to everyone to read, it would also be free to everyone to write. An instructor dissatisfied with the textbook’s version of the War of 1812 could simply rewrite those pages and offer them to others to incorporate. An instructor who felt that the book neglected the story of New Mexico in the nineteenth century could write a few paragraphs that others might decide to incorporate.
This model imagines something open and anarchistic in the style of Wikipedia. Textbooks (not to mention scholarly articles) pose deeper problems of mediating conflicting interpretation than are faced by Wikipedia with its factualist emphasis. But commons-based peer production need not be so unstructured. After all, not everyone can rewrite the Linux kernel core. Everyone can contribute ideas and codes, but a central committee decides what is incorporated in an official release. Similarly, PlanetMath, a free online collaborative math encyclopedia, uses an “owner-centric” authority model in contrast to Wikipedia’s “free form” approach. As one of the founders, Aaron Krowne, has explained, “there is an owner of each entry-initially the entry’s creator. Other users may suggest changes to each entry, but only the owner can apply these changes. If the owner comes to trust individual users enough, he or she can grant these specific users ‘edit’ access to the entry.” This has the potential disadvantage of discouraging open participation and requiring more commitment from some participants, but it gives a much stronger place to expertise by assuming that the “owner is the de facto expert in the topic at hand, above all others, and all others must defer.”79
Even so, the difficulties in implementing such a model for professional scholarship are obvious. How would you deal with the interpretative disputes that are at the heart of scholarly historical writing? How would we allocate credit, which is so integral to professional culture? Could you get a promotion based on having “contributed to” a collaborative project? There are no easy solutions. But it is worth noting that contributors to open-source software projects are not motivated simply by altruism. Their reputations-and hence their attractiveness as employees-are often greatly enhanced by participation in such projects. And we do reward people for collaborative professional work such as service on an editorial board. Nor are collaborative projects as free and frictionless as their greatest enthusiasts like to maintain. There are significant organizational costs-what the economists call “transaction costs”-to creating and maintaining such projects. Someone has to pay for the servers and the bandwidth and install and update the software. Wikipedia would have never gotten off the ground without the support of Wales and Bomis. More recently, it has launched fund-raising campaigns to cover its substantial and growing expenses.
Still, Wikipedia and Linux show that there are alternative models to producing encyclopedias and software than the hierarchical, commercial model represented by Bill Gates and Microsoft. And whether or not historians consider alternative models for producing their own work, they should pay closer attention to their erstwhile competitors at Wikipedia than Microsoft devoted to worrying about an obscure free and open-source operating system called Linux.
Roy Rosenzweig
http://chnm.gmu.edu/resources/essays/d/42
June 2006
Why Should We Care? Implications for Historians
One reason professional historians need to pay attention to Wikipedia is because our students do. A student contributor to an online discussion about Wikipedia noted that he used the online encyclopedia to study the historical terms for a test on early romanticism in Britain. Other students routinely list it in term paper bibliographies. We should not view this prospect with undue alarm. Wikipedia for the most part gets its facts right. (The student of British culture reported that Wikipedia proved as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica and easier to use.) And the general panic about students’ use of Internet sources is overblown. You can find bad history in the library, and while much misinformation circulates on the Internet, it also helps to debunk myths and to correct misinformation.52
Yet, the ubiquity and ease of use of Wikipedia still pose important challenges for history teachers. Wikipedia can act as a megaphone, amplifying the (sometimes incorrect) conventional wisdom. As Wikinfo (a fork, or spin-off, from Wikipedia) explains: “A wiki with so many hundreds of thousands of pages is bound to get some things wrong. The problem is, that because Wikipedia has become the ‘aol’ [America Online] of the library and reference world, such false information and incorrect definitions of terms become multiple incompetences, propagated to millions of potential readers world-wide.” Not only does Wikipedia propagate misinformation but so do those who appropriate its content, as they are entitled to do under the gfdl. As a result, as the blogger John Morse observed, “when you search Google for some obscure term that Wikipedia knows about, you might get two dozen results that all say the same thing-seemingly authoritative until you realize they all spread from a snapshot of Wiki-one that is now severed from the context of editability and might seem more creditable than it really is.” The Web site Answers.com, which promises to provide “quick, integrated reference answers,” relies heavily on Wikipedia for those answers. And Google, which already puts Wikipedia results high in its rankings, now sends people looking for “definitions” to Answers.com. Can you hear the sound of one hand clapping?53
Wikipedia’s ease of use and its tendency to show up at the top of Google rankings in turn reinforce students’ propensity to latch on to the first source they encounter rather than to weigh multiple sources of information. Teachers have little more to fear from students’ starting with Wikipedia than from their starting with most other basic reference sources. They have a lot to fear if students stop there. To state the obvious: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and encyclopedias have intrinsic limits. Most readers of this journal have not relied heavily on encyclopedias since junior high school days. And most readers of this journal do not want their students to rely heavily on encyclopedias-digital or print, free or subscription, professionally written or amateur and collaborative-for research papers. One Wikipedia contributor noted that despite her “deep appreciation for it,” she still “roll[s her] eyes whenever students submit papers with Wikipedia as a citation.” “Any encyclopedia, of any kind,” wrote another observer, “is a horrible place to get the whole story on any subject.” Encyclopedias “give you the topline”; they are “the Reader’s Digest of deep knowledge.” Fifty years ago, the family encyclopedia provided this “rough and ready primer on some name or idea”; now that role is being played by the Internet and increasingly by Wikipedia.54
But should we blame Wikipedia for the appetite for predigested and prepared information or the tendency to believe that anything you read is true? That problem existed back in the days of the family encyclopedia. And one key solution remains the same: Spend more time teaching about the limitations of all information sources, including Wikipedia, and emphasizing the skills of critical analysis of primary and secondary sources.
Another solution is to emulate the great democratic triumph of Wikipedia-its demonstration that people are eager for free and accessible information resources. If historians believe that what is available free on the Web is low quality, then we have a responsibility to make better information sources available online. Why are so many of our scholarly journals locked away behind subscription gates? What about American National Biography Online-written by professional historians, sponsored by our scholarly societies, and supported by millions of dollars in foundation and government grants? Why is it available only to libraries that often pay thousands of dollars per year rather than to everyone on the Web as Wikipedia is? Shouldn’t professional historians join in the massive democratization of access to knowledge reflected by Wikipedia and the Web in general?55 American National Biography Online may be a significantly better historical resource than Wikipedia, but its impact is much smaller because it is available to so few people.
The limited audience for subscription-based historical resources such as American National Biography Online becomes an even larger issue when we move outside the borders of the United States and especially into poorer parts of the world, where such subscription fees pose major problems even for libraries. Moreover, in some of those places, where censorship of textbooks and other historical resources is common, the fact that Wikipedia’s freedom means both “free beer” and “free speech” has profound implications because it allows the circulation of alternative historical voices and narratives. Some repressive governments have responded by restricting access to Wikipedia. China, for example, currently prevents its citizens from reading the English- or Chinese-language versions of Wikipedia. And it is probably not a coincidence that the first blocking of Wikipedia in China began on the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests.56
Professional historians have things to learn not only from the open and democratic distribution model of Wikipedia but also from its open and democratic production model. Although Wikipedia as a product is problematic as a sole source of information, the process of creating Wikipedia fosters an appreciation of the very skills that historians try to teach. Despite Wikipedia’s unconventionality in the production and distribution of knowledge, its epistemological approach-exemplified by the npov policy-is highly conventional, even old-fashioned. The guidelines and advice documents that Wikipedia offers its editors sound very much like the standard manuals offered in undergraduate history methods classes. Editors are enjoined, for example, to “cite the source” and to check their facts and reminded that “verifiability” is an “official policy” of Wikipedia. An article directed at those writing articles about history for Wikipedia explains (in the manner of a History 101 instructor) the difference between primary and secondary sources and also suggests helpfully that “the correct standard of material to generate encyclopedic entries about historical subjects are: 1. Peer reviewed journal articles from a journal of history; 2. Monographs written by historians (BA Hons (Hist), MA, PhD); 3. Primary sources.”57
Participants in the editing process also often learn a more complex lesson about history writing-namely that the “facts” of the past and the way those facts are arranged and reported are often highly contested. One Wikipedia guideline document reports with an air of discovery: “Although it doesn’t seem to be logical to worry about a Wikipedia article, people do battle over history and the way it is written all the time.” And such skirmishes break out all over Wikipedia. Each article contains a companion “Discussion” page, and on those pages, editors engage-often intensely-in what can only be called historiographic debate. Was Woodrow Wilson a racist? Did the New Deal resolve the problems of the Great Depression? Sometimes relatively narrow issues are debated (for example, William Jennings Bryan’s role in the passage of the Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee) that open up much broader issues (for example, the sources of antievolution sentiment in the 1920s).58
Was John Brown a murderer? On this portion of the discussion page for the article on John Brown, Wikipedians debate whether to use "killed" or "murdered" to refer to his actions and which word accords with the encyclopedia's neutral-point-of-view policy. For Wikipedia's thousands of contributors, such discussions are a form of popular historiographic debate. http ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:John_Brown_(abolitionist)/ (March 8, 2006).
Wikipedia has even developed its own form of peer review in its debates on whether articles deserve “featured article” status. Those aspiring to have their articles receive that status-given to the best .1 percent of articles as judged by such criteria as completeness, factual accuracy, and good writing-are encouraged to request “peer review” in order to “expose articles to closer scrutiny than they might otherwise receive.”59 Then further public debate decides whether Wikipedians agree on awarding featured article status.
Thus, those who create Wikipedia’s articles and debate their contents are involved in an astonishingly intense and widespread process of democratic self-education. Wikipedia, observes one Wikipedia activist, “teaches both contributors and the readers. By empowering contributors to inform others, it gives them incentive to learn how to do so effectively, and how to write well and neutrally.” The classicist James O’Donnell has argued that the benefit of Wikipedia may be greater for its active participants than for its readers: “A community that finds a way to talk in this way is creating education and online discourse at a higher level.”60
My colleagues at the Center for History and New Media interviewed people who regularly contribute to history articles on Wikipedia, and a passion for self-education comes through in numerous interviews. A Canadian contributor, James Willys Rosenzweig (no relation), observed that his “involvement in Wikipedia [is] a natural fit” because “I am interested in a broad variety of subjects, and I read for pleasure in as many fields as I can.” APWoolrich, a British contributor who left school at age sixteen and became an ardent self-taught industrial archeologist, answered the question “Why do I enjoy it?” with “It beats tv any day, in my view!”61
But APWoolrich is as enthusiastic about contributing to the education of others as to his own. Wikipedia, he told us, “accords with my personal philosophy of sharing knowledge, and it links me with the rest of humanity.” He believes we have a “duty” to share knowledge “without thought of reward.” “Wikipedia is the ‘Invisible College’ concept revived for the 21st century.” A blind high school student had a different reference point. “It is almost like playing a computer game but it is actually useful because it helps someone anywhere in the world get information that is uncluttered by junk,” he told us. “I think of myself as a teacher,” said Einar Kvaran, an uncredentialed “art historian without portfolio,” who spends about six hours a day writing articles about American art and sculpture. Like bloggers and amateur Web site developers, contributors to Wikipedia enjoy the opportunity to make their work public and to contribute to building the public space of the Web.62
Should those who write history for a living join such popular history makers in writing history in Wikipedia? My own tentative answer is yes.63 If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible. And if every member of the Organization of American Historians devoted just one day to improving the entries in her or his areas of expertise, it would not only significantly raise the quality of Wikipedia, it would also enhance popular historical literacy. Historians could similarly play a role by participating in the populist peer review process that certifies contributions as featured articles.
Still, my view is tempered by the recognition that the encounter between professional historians and amateur Wikipedians is likely to be rocky at times. That seems to have been particularly true in the early days of Wikipedia. Larry Sanger reported that some of earliest contributors were “academics and other highly-qualified people”-including two historians with Ph.D.s-who “were slowly worn down and driven away by having to deal with difficult people on the project.” “I feel that my integrity has been questioned,” the historian J. Hoffmann Kemp wrote in signing off in August 2002. “I’m too tired to play anymore.”64
Even Jimmy Wales, who has been more tolerant of “difficult people” than Sanger, complained about “an unfortunate tendency of disrespect for history as a professional discipline.” He saw the tendency reflected in historical entries that synthesize “work in a non-standard way” and “produce novel narratives and historical interpretations with citation to primary sources to back up their interpretation of events.” He noted that “some who completely understand why Wikipedia ought not create novel theories of physics by citing the results of experiments and so on and synthesizing them into something new, may fail to see how the same thing applies to history.”65
But the flip side of Wales’s respect for the historical discipline, as expressed in the ban on original research (and original interpretations), is that it seemingly limits professional historians’ role in Wikipedia. The “no original research policy” means that you cannot offer a startling new interpretation of Warren Harding based on newly uncovered sources. As a result, while Wikipedia officially “welcomes experts and academics,” it also warns that “such experts do not occupy a privileged position within Wikipedia. They should refer to themselves and their publications in the third person and write from a neutral point of view (npov). They must also cite publications, and may not use their unpublished knowledge as a source of information (which would be impossible to verify).”66
Even a comparison that focuses on the ban on original research understates the differences between professionals and amateurs. For one thing, historical expertise does not reside primarily in the possession of some set of obscure facts. It relies more often on a deep acquaintance with a wide variety of already published narratives and an ability to synthesize those narratives (and facts) coherently. It is considerably easier to craft a policy about “verifiability” or even “neutrality” than about “historical significance.” Professional historians might find an account accurate and fair but trivial; that is what some see as the difference between history and antiquarianism. Thus, the conflict between professionals and amateurs is not necessarily a simple one over whether people are doing good or bad history but a more complex (and more interesting) conflict about what kind of history is being done. Comparing the free Wikipedia and the costly and expensively produced American National Biography Online erects professional historical scholarship as a trans-historical and transcultural standard of history writing when we know that there are many ways of writing and talking about the past. What is particularly interesting and revealing about Wikipedia is its reflection of what we could call a “popular history poetics” that follows different rules from conventional professional scholarship.67
One noticeable difference is the affection for surprising, amusing, or curious details-something that Wikipedia shares with other forms of popular historical writing such as articles in American Heritage magazine. Consider some details that Wikipedians include in their Lincoln biography that do not make their way into McPherson’s profile: Lincoln’s sharing a birthday with Charles Darwin; his nicknames (the Rail Splitter is mentioned twice); his edict making Thanksgiving a national holiday; and the end of his bloodline with the death of Robert Beckwith in 1985. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia devotes five times as much space to Lincoln’s assassination as the longer American National Biography Online profile does.68 The same predilection for colorful details marks other portraits. We learn from the Harding biography that the socialist Norman Thomas was a paper boy for the Marion Daily Star (which Harding owned), that Harding reached the sublime degree as a Master Mason, and that Al Jolson and Mary Pickford came to Marion, Ohio, during the 1920 campaign for photo ops. It devotes two paragraphs to speculation about whether Harding had “Negro blood” and five paragraphs to his extramarital affairs. Meanwhile, key topics-domestic and foreign policies, the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy Act of 1921, immigration restriction, and naval treaties-are ignored or hurried over. We similarly learn that Woodrow Wilson belonged to Phi Kappa Psi fraternity and wrote his initials on the underside of a table in the Johns Hopkins University history department, but not about his law practice or his intellectual development at Princeton University.69
Wikipedia’s view of history is not only more anecdotal and colorful than professional history, it is also-again like much popular history-more factualist. That is reflected in the incessant arguing about npov, but it can also be seen in the obsession with list making. The profile of fdr leads you not just to a roll of all presidents but also to a list of every secretary of the interior, every chairman of the Democratic National Committee, every key event that happened on April 12 (when Roosevelt died), and every major birth in 1882 (when he was born). From the perspective of professional historians, the problem of Wikipedian history is not that it disregards the facts but that it elevates them above everything else and spends too much time and energy (in the manner of many collectors) on organizing those facts into categories and lists.
Finally, Wikipedian history is presentist in a slightly different way from that of professional history-where, for example, a conservative turn in the polity leads us to reevaluate conservatism in the past. Rather, Wikipedia entries often focus on topics that have ignited recent public, not just professional, controversy. The topic of Lincoln’s sexuality-not mentioned by McPherson-occupied so much of the Wikipedia biography that in December 2004 a separate 1,160-word entry was created that focuses on C. A. Tripp’s controversial, then-recent book The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. The entry on the Spanish-American War examines in considerable detail whether the Maine was sunk by a mine (a subject in the news as the result of a 1998 National Geographic study) but pays no attention to the important (to professional historians) arguments of Kristin L. Hoganson’s book of the same year that “gender politics” provoked the war.70
That the latest article in National Geographic rather than the latest book from Yale University Press shapes Wikipedia entries reflects the fact that Wikipedia historians operate in a different world than historians employed in universities. Although Wikipedia enjoins its authors to “cite the source,” that policy is honored mainly in the breach-unlike in academic historical journals, where authors and editors obsess over proper and full citation. Moreover, the bibliographies offered after Wikipedia entries are often incomplete or out-of-date-a cardinal sin in professional history. Yet Wikipedians are mindful of a wider community of “historians.” It is just that for them the most important community is authors of other Wikipedia entries. And every article includes literally dozens of cross-references (links) to other Wikipedia articles.
An account of Lincoln’s life that focuses on debates about his sexuality and dwells on his birth date, nicknames, and assassination is not “wrong,” but it is not the kind of brief account that a professional historian such as McPherson would write. Professional historians who enter the terrain of Wikipedia will have an easy time correcting the year when the Supreme Court invalidated the nira but a much harder time eliminating Lincoln’s nicknames. Wikipedians would agree with professional historians that the Supreme Court decision happened on a particular day, but they might not agree that Lincoln’s nicknames are “unimportant” or “uninteresting.” And such historians will have to decide how much of their disciplinary “authority” they are prepared to “share” in this new public space.71
Although making people we generally view as our audience into our collaborators may prove unsettling, it will also be instructive. One history doctoral student at an Ivy League institution who has contributed actively to Wikipedia explained that “I use it primarily to practice writing for a non-academic audience, and as a way to solidify my understanding of topics (nothing helps one remember things like rewriting it).” He added, “I regard my Wikipedia contributions as informal and relatively anonymous, and use a much more casual demeanor than one would use in a professional setting (that is, I often tell people they don’t know what they’re talking about).”72 If Wikipedia teaches us (and our students) to speak more clearly to the public and to say more clearly what is on our minds, it will have a positive impact on academic culture.
But a much broader question about academic culture is whether the methods and approaches that have proven so successful in Wikipedia can also affect how scholarly work is produced, shared, and debated. Wikipedia embodies an optimistic view of community and collaboration that already informs the best of the academic enterprise. The sociologist Robert K. Merton talked about “the communism of the scientific ethos,” and communal sharing is an ideal that some historians hold and that many of our practices reflect, even while alternative, more individualistic and competitive, modes also thrive.73
Can the wiki way foster the collaborative creation of historical knowledge? One promising approach would leverage the volunteer labor of amateurs and enthusiasts to advance historical understanding. Historians have, of course, benefited from the labors of amateurs and volunteers. Think of the generations of local historians who have collected, preserved, and organized historical documents subsequently mined by professional historians. But the new technology of the Internet opens up the possibility of much more massive efforts relying on what the legal scholar Yochai Benkler has called “commons-based peer production.” The “central characteristic” of such production, wrote Benkler, “is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.” “Ubiquitous computer communications networks,” he argued, have brought about “a dramatic change in the scope, scale, and efficacy of peer production.”74 The most prominent recent example of such non-market-based peer production is free and open-source software. The Internet would now grind to a halt without such free and open-source resources as the operating system Linux, the Web server software Apache, the database MySql, and the programming language php.
Yet, as Benkler showed, the peer production of information is much broader than free software, and he offers Wikipedia as one notable example. Another-and one perhaps more relevant to professional historians-is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (nasa) Ames Clickworkers project, which encouraged volunteers to “mark craters on maps of Mars, classify craters that have already been marked, or search the landscape of Mars for ‘honeycomb’ terrain.” In six months, more than 85,000 people visited the site and made almost 2 million entries. An analysis of the markings found that “the automatically-computed consensus of a large number of clickworkers is virtually indistinguishable from the inputs of a geologist with years of experience in identifying Mars craters.”75
Probably the closest historical equivalent to the nasa clickworkers are the legions of volunteer genealogists who have been digitizing thousands of documents. For example, volunteers working for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints digitized the records of the 55 million people listed in the 1880 United States census and the 1881 Canadian census and made them available for free at the church’s FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service. Another volunteer effort, Project Gutenberg, has created an online repository of 15,000 e-texts of public domain books. Optical character recognition (ocr) software can relatively cheaply and automatically digitize print works, but it is generally only 95-99 percent accurate. To get a fully clean text is more expensive. Enter “distributed proofreaders”-a collaborative Web-based method of proofreading that breaks a work into individual pages to allow multiple proofreaders to work on the same book simultaneously. About half of the Project Gutenberg books have come out of this commons-based peer production.76
What if we organized a similar “distributed transcribers” to work on handwritten historical documents that otherwise will never be digitized? Volunteers could take their turns transcribing page images of the widely used Cameron Family Papers at the Southern Historical Collection that would be presented to them online. The same automated checking process used by Ames Clickworkers or among distributed proofreaders could be applied. A similar approach could be taken to transcribing the massive quantities of recorded sound-the Lyndon B. Johnson tapes, for example-that are enormously expensive to transcribe and cannot be rendered into text with current automated methods. Max J. Evans, the head of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, has recently proposed something similar. He called for a corps of “volunteer data extractors” who would index and describe archival collections that are currently only minimally processed. Such an approach, he argues, would take “advantage of organized, or self-selected and anonymous users who can work at home and in remote locations.”77
The barriers to success in such a project are more social than technological. Devising the systems to present the page images or tapes online is not so difficult. It is harder to create the interest to involve volunteers in such a project. But who would have thought that 85,000 people would volunteer to look for Mars craters or that 60,000 people would write and edit entries for Wikipedia? Of course, denizens of the Internet are likely to be more excited about searching through Mars craters than through nineteenth-century women’s diaries. Still, such projects have shown the ability, as Benkler wrote, to “capitalize on an enormous pool of underutilized intelligent human creativity and willingness to engage in intellectual effort.”78
If the Internet and the notion of commons-based peer production provide intriguing opportunities for mobilizing volunteer historical enthusiasm to produce a massive digital archive, what about mobilizing and coordinating the work of professional historians in that fashion? That so much professional historical work already relies on volunteer labor-the peer review of journal articles, the staffing of conference program committees-suggests that professionals are willing to give up significant amounts of their time to advance the historical enterprise. But are they also willing to take the further step of abandoning individual credit and individual ownership of intellectual property as do Wikipedia authors?
Could we, for example, write a collaborative U.S. history textbook that would be free to all our students? After all, there is massive overlap in content and interpretation among the more than two dozen college survey textbooks. Yet the commercial publishing system mandates that every new survey text start from scratch. An open-source textbook would not only be free to everyone to read, it would also be free to everyone to write. An instructor dissatisfied with the textbook’s version of the War of 1812 could simply rewrite those pages and offer them to others to incorporate. An instructor who felt that the book neglected the story of New Mexico in the nineteenth century could write a few paragraphs that others might decide to incorporate.
This model imagines something open and anarchistic in the style of Wikipedia. Textbooks (not to mention scholarly articles) pose deeper problems of mediating conflicting interpretation than are faced by Wikipedia with its factualist emphasis. But commons-based peer production need not be so unstructured. After all, not everyone can rewrite the Linux kernel core. Everyone can contribute ideas and codes, but a central committee decides what is incorporated in an official release. Similarly, PlanetMath, a free online collaborative math encyclopedia, uses an “owner-centric” authority model in contrast to Wikipedia’s “free form” approach. As one of the founders, Aaron Krowne, has explained, “there is an owner of each entry-initially the entry’s creator. Other users may suggest changes to each entry, but only the owner can apply these changes. If the owner comes to trust individual users enough, he or she can grant these specific users ‘edit’ access to the entry.” This has the potential disadvantage of discouraging open participation and requiring more commitment from some participants, but it gives a much stronger place to expertise by assuming that the “owner is the de facto expert in the topic at hand, above all others, and all others must defer.”79
Even so, the difficulties in implementing such a model for professional scholarship are obvious. How would you deal with the interpretative disputes that are at the heart of scholarly historical writing? How would we allocate credit, which is so integral to professional culture? Could you get a promotion based on having “contributed to” a collaborative project? There are no easy solutions. But it is worth noting that contributors to open-source software projects are not motivated simply by altruism. Their reputations-and hence their attractiveness as employees-are often greatly enhanced by participation in such projects. And we do reward people for collaborative professional work such as service on an editorial board. Nor are collaborative projects as free and frictionless as their greatest enthusiasts like to maintain. There are significant organizational costs-what the economists call “transaction costs”-to creating and maintaining such projects. Someone has to pay for the servers and the bandwidth and install and update the software. Wikipedia would have never gotten off the ground without the support of Wales and Bomis. More recently, it has launched fund-raising campaigns to cover its substantial and growing expenses.
Still, Wikipedia and Linux show that there are alternative models to producing encyclopedias and software than the hierarchical, commercial model represented by Bill Gates and Microsoft. And whether or not historians consider alternative models for producing their own work, they should pay closer attention to their erstwhile competitors at Wikipedia than Microsoft devoted to worrying about an obscure free and open-source operating system called Linux.