[WikiEN-l] Is Wikipedia the first draft of history - New York Times take on Joe Wilson article

[Charles Matthews]

Keith Old wrote:
> Folks,
> The New York Times reports:
>
> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/the-wikipedia-battle-over-joe-wilsons-obama-heckling/
>
>
> If journalism is the first draft of history, what is a Wikipedia entry when
> it is updated within minutes of an event to reflect changes in a person’s
> biography?
>
>   
The zeroth draft of bad history ... usually heavily influenced by 
partisans, with the instantly available sources rather than reliable 
ones. Situation normal, all fouled up. We do have an interesting and 
novel position for WP vis-a-vis historiography, namely that WP coverage 
is a movie where journalism is more like a series of stills.

If you look at historiography of something like the English Civil War, 
you can see quite a number of parallels, such as stridency, emphasis on 
personalities, pamphleteering/blogging as a source of opinions, and so 
on. The whole business of the Internet taking us back to the 17th 
century and a reactive, emotional style of politics seems to me very 
suggestive.

Charles