In about June 2006, Roy Rosenzweig published in the American Historcal
Review a very interesting and somewhat surprising review of Wikipedia as
an on-line reference work for history. You can probably find it on-line
by some ingenious clicking around.

Although I have not ever looked FOR anything on Wikipedia, it has begun
to pop up, anyway, when I do a Google search for something, hoping to
find a bibliographical reference to reliable scholarship. The ridiculous
trash there about Anthony Johnson and slavery has begun to appear in
print, now, and all historians of 17th century Virginia and of slavery
will forever be having to combat that idiocy.

Wikipedia entries are no better than the people who put them up and no
better than the resources that the people who put them up use to prepare
them. Precisely the same can and should be said about all printed
sources, too, and we all know how much unreliable stuff has been set in
type.

Caveat Lexor.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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Visit the Library of Virginia's Web site at http://www.lva.lib.va.us