I have to agree with Paul Finkelman about Wikipedia. Whatever the current trendy theories about the wisdom of crowds/insight of wikis may be, Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable. In general, anyone can change any essay at any time and in any way. You have only to consider controversial organizations and then look at their Wikipedia essays to see that people carefully scrub Wikipedia in the name of all kinds of axe-grinding; while that certainly can also be said of academic publications, you're far less apt to find errors of basic facts in academic publications than in Wikipedia entries.
Kevin R. C. Gutzman, J.D., Ph.D.
Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Department of History
Western Connecticut State University
Author, James Madison and the Making of America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012);
The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2007)
KevinGutzman.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Steve Corneliussen
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2012 9:40 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [VA-HIST] Wikipedia
> From: John Carter
> I had a ninth grade history teacher who once told me, when writing a
> term paper, "Do not use the encyclopedia as one of your references."
> I would say the same applies to Wikipedia.
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> From: Paul Finkelman
> Sadly much of this Wikipedia entry is wrong -- why are we not surprised?
> This is the danger of using a source that has no scholarly oversight.
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I see what these commenters mean, and I hear similar concerns from the scientists who surround me in my day job. But at the same time, doesn't some real usefulness emerge from the evolving practice of crowd-sourcing knowledge with the Internet? What shifted me in this direction was that often-cited 2005 article in the international science journal Nature. It carried the headline "Special Report: Internet encyclopaedias go head to
head: Jimmy Wales' Wikipedia comes close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its science entries, a Nature investigation finds."
(http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html)
Wikipedia's possible usefulness doesn't undermine the advice to students not to use encyclopedia articles as term-paper sources, and it doesn't reduce the weight of Professor Finkelman's caution that serious scholarship requires serious peer review. Nevertheless I believe I see Jeffersonian dimensions here -- not just technological but intellectual and social. So I usually speak up for Wikipedia and for what it represents, in principle, in the Internet age. Thanks.
Steven T. Corneliussen
http://www.physicstoday.org/daily_edition/science_and_the_media
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