From: Mark <delirium(a)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