[WikiEN-l] Tabloid sources (was Wikipedia leadership})

[Andreas Kolbe]

--- On Sat, 5/2/11, Mark <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
> From: Mark <delirium at 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