--- On Sat, 5/2/11, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
From: Mark delirium@hackish.org On 2/4/11 6:08 PM, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
"I do not permit any of my students to cite your
encyclopedia as any
kind of reliable source when they write papers for me.
Wikipedia is too
much a playground for social activists of whatever
editorial bent wherein
the lowest common denominator gets to negotiate
reality for the readers.
No thanks."
I run into these kinds of reactions fairly frequently, but honestly I don't see how they're in tune with reality. There at least seems to be a bit of knee-jerk reactionary sentiment going on (and among academics, some turf-defending and credentialism).
I certainly encourage my students to read Wikipedia, though I also encourage them to follow up the sources and consult alternative sources. There are indeed "social activists of whatever editorial bent", but that's true of academic presses as well! A well-developed Wikipedia article in my experience is less likely than an academic book to completely ignore a large number of sources; academics are much more willing to decide "field X is crap" and ignore it entirely, e.g. if you look at how economists treat critical theorists and vice versa (and how economists treat economists from rival camps).
Consider, say, our article [[History of U.S. foreign policy]]. It could be better, certainly could be more detailed (though some sections point to more detailed separate articles), but it's not bad overall imo. It covers some opposing views, both in terms of historiographic disputes and political disputes. Now compare it to a recently published Princeton University Press book on the history of U.S. foreign policy, "Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz". The book is of course more detailed than our article, and includes some excellent material that we should cover. But if you were to ask which one is influenced more by "social activists" and which one more neutrally covers conflicting views of U.S. history and foreign policy, we beat the book by a large margin!
And it's hardly an isolated example, if you look at the list of recent publications by academic presses, there is a whole lot of social activism going on. Not that that's even necessarily bad; academic presses don't serve the same role as an encyclopedia. But it's strange to criticize Wikipedia from that standpoint!
-Mark
Of course academic books engage in social activism, and represent a spectrum of opinions. But compiling an authoritative reference work is quite a different job from writing a book with a provocative thesis that stirs debate, as Immerman has done. Publishers of general-purpose and specialised encyclopedias realise that, and so do the scholars writing for them, who are accountable to the work's editors.
We don't have any similar accountability. Perhaps that is another way scholars and universities could become involved, besides personal editing involvement and setting their students Wikipedia projects: by reviewing the material we have in their area of expertise, providing a quality rating similar to those of our own quality rating processes, and providing improvement suggestions that the community can then follow up on.
Andreas