wikiwhat (or: wiki-rant)

You'll remember, perhaps, my student who cribbed from Wikipedia and few other topically-related websites on a paper last semester? This semester, students have referred to quick-reference websites I didn't even know existed (but which sound like Cliffs Notes on the web), but they're staying honest, so far. Well, now using Wiki is a point of academic debate and our ever-reliable arbiter of what is culturally important, the New York Times, has weighed in.

After the article in Kolz's Atlantic Monthly a while back, I find the culture and utility of Wikipedia interesting and perplexing. Good to think with, as it were, about what counts as reliable knowledge, and who can participate in developing that knowledge. It's similar to the problem of "public history" as lived in Britain -- you have train enthusiasts and people responsible for historic homes and so forth who know so much of the detail of a historical event, object, place, or what-have-you. And sometimes, they're great on the broader context, too, and everyone learns and benefits. We know this, and the ivory tower of academe has, in fits and starts, acknowledged it.

Wiki, especially with historical resesarch, is just different. I'm all for the democratization of knowledge, especially as it applies to using non-conventional sources to do history work, or think critically about history. Using songs, poems, statistics read the other way round, posters, journals, as well as "conventional" archival materials makes, I think, for a more well-rounded narrative and more interesting reading. Maybe even a more accurate and balanced sense of the past and its impact on the present. Oral histories are fascinating and methodologically challenging. And we are encouraged to be the sort of interdisciplinary creatures who consider multivalent meanings and differential impacts. (But then, I'm all about culture, and not Marxism, right?).

The problem with Wiki is, in a way, the problem of the flowering of the web more generally. It may be reliable sometimes, but other times is just wrong. Generally, we use our common sense to judge the accuracy of web content - trusting our instincts. But with Wiki, what is interesting, rather than what is accurate, takes center stage [it may only be interesting to a select group of enthusiasts, but still]. We have students now who were practically born googling things they didn't know offhand - the web is their first resort (and mine, too, most of the time). Generally, the academic world accommodates that. Prohibitions against using Wiki for research just acknowledge, implicitly, that Wiki is only the first of many steps in researching or verifying something.

It seems to me that what is needed, and what isn't said in the above article, is a discussion about sources and veracity and writing. The point is not that Wiki can be wrong -- if it's wrong, take points off, ding your students for citing encyclopedias of any form (which we do here), but let the take-home lesson be that research means research. It means digging, not the quick fix, and it also involves a generous amount of conversation and contention about sources and their use. Sending your students off to study for exams without easy & open recourse to a TA or professor - and worse still, not working through the basics of starting and finishing a research paper - is going to make students dependent on web content. If students don't know, as in the Middlebury case, the role of the Jesuits in Japan, and they don't feel like they can ask their prof., and they panic the night before an exam, then your reliable textbook ceases to be a stopgap for misinformation. If they're lazy, well, they'll learn.

And, the bottom line is, if Wiki writers cite their sources, then our new generation of Wiki-using historians will have to chase down those sources just like anyone else. If they don't cite their sources, if a nugget of information does not verifiably originate from a primary or secondary source, then it doesn't fly.

The question that Middlebury faculty and students are wrestling with, whether citing Wiki is legitimate, seems to totally miss the point. Wiki is a quick fix, and you can get burned by it. But when you're learning - and being taught - to formulate and substantiate an argument, one source is never sufficient. Have the cultural argument, fine, but convoluting it with the methodological one is needless.

Wiki poses an interesting cultural problem that will be fodder for historians in a few generations - there's interesting work about rumor and "telling tales" in African history that lets us think outside of colonial archival materials (you can tell I'm studying for orals, eh?). How people believe that what they're reading is true, how word-of-mouth has been altered by word-of-web, so to speak, are really fascinating problems. Wiki will give us a lot to work with.

But for Jesuits in Japan or the Protestant Reformation? Maybe I'm an early-web-generation fogie, but start by doing your homework, kids.