A Different Take on Wikipedia

When it comes to reference and scholarly authority, I disagree to some extent with my fellow Cliopatrians Jonathan Dresner and Oscar Chamberlain that "the odds are better when you're in the stacks", in relation to Wikipedia.

Pick a topic that's been written about by historians or social scientists for fifty years or so. Now go start pulling books off the shelf at random that are concerned with that topic. Start reading the older ones. Some of them are going to be pretty embarassing in terms of factual accuracy and argumentative judiciousness even if they were written within a peer-reviewed norm. Historical scholarship also often passes on claims and arguments made in past work without vetting or revisiting those arguments, and it can often be very surprising to go back and read source material in this light: you find that conventional wisdom about what it says is often wrong, especially for less heavily-trafficked or analyzed sources. I have a student working on a thesis this semester who is looking at some primary materials on colonial India and finding that some common scholarly interpretations of them are in her (entirely reasonable, I feel) reading fairly wrong and in a few cases, wrong because of simple or casual misreadings rather than analytically biased readings.

You might protest that scholarly historians are savvy to this, and don't go picking older or less reliable books off the shelf. Perhaps. But we're talking here about what we advise or permit our students to do, and I wouldn't wager that a student is more likely to find the one most authoritative work by going to the shelves than they are to find information by going to Wikipedia.

Let's take the entry on Afrocentrism on Wikipedia, which I assigned students in my class to read. It's very interesting: hotly contested, often re-written, a battleground between partisans. I'd be uncomfortable using it to make"objective" claims about Afrocentrism, sure. But let's turn to the stacks instead. Who are you going to direct students to: Mary Lefkowitz and Stephen Howe or Molefi Asante and Cheikh Anta Diop? There isn't much in between: you could argue that Gerald Early, Ibrahim Sundiata, and others have written more evenhanded assessments, but partisans on one side or the other would fiercely contest that claim. So what do I tell my students?"Go read ten or fifteen books and then maybe you'll know something" or"Read this Wikipedia entry and the backchannel discussion linked to it". I have no problem with the latter choice.

I would readily acknowledge that there are a few places where Wikipedia is less usefully authoritative than other sources; there are equally many places where it is more so (or where there are no printed sources that contain the terms, concept and names which is defines). Most of the time, it's neither better nor worse in this respect: but it is more accessible, more rapidly, which is all to the good.

For those who trouble to look carefully, Wikipedia even provides a way to track error and malevolent intent that conventional peer reviewed publications do not: you can see the changes others have made. In some respects, Wikipedia is a dream for a historian of knowledge, or for someone interested in intellectual history in general. Look for example at the detailed history of the entry for Social Darwinism. That's pretty interesting. The same thing very well might happen in a scholarly reference work, only we'd never see the hand of canonical inclusion and exclusion at work, or the underlying debates.

Wikipedia also presents a pretty interesting challenge to anyone who has expertise who spots an inexpert entry. With a published encyclopedia, reference or scholarly work, the most you can do is write a critique of that work which might appear in print two to five years later, given peer reviewed publication cycles. By the time your correction or critique appears, the work you are critiquing is in all likelihood regarded as obsolete. If your correction is not widely disseminated, it won't matter anyway. And your correction may well be disputed or regarded as stemming from an epistemological rather than empirical disagreement. With Wikipedia, the challenge is more immediate: write a correction to the entry now. This very minute. Yes, that might feel like being the little Dutch boy with his fingers in the dike: you couldn't hope to be a good steward to more than a few entries. At the same time, the impact of your correction is immediate, indisputable and potentially very potent.

This isn't to say that there aren't ways for Wikipedia to improve on what it does, to make it harder to vandalize the site or to carry out crank vendettas in unwatched entries. Nor would I tell my students to trust it. But I don't tell them to trust historical scholarship, either. In both cases, there are skills involved in knowing what to trust and when to trust it. Wikipedia is a good opportunity to teach information literacy for the 21st Century: in many ways, a better opportunity than the books in the stacks.