Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past - 0 views
-
possessive individualism
-
A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture
- ...14 more annotations...
-
Are Wikipedians good historians? As in the old tale of the blind men and the elephant, your assessment of Wikipedia as history depends a great deal on what part you touch. It also depends, as we shall see, on how you define “history.”
-
You may copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially, provided … you add no other conditions whatsoever to those of this License.”
-
Yet what is most impressive is that Wikipedia has found unpaid volunteers to write surprisingly detailed and reliable portraits of relatively obscure historical figures—for example, 900 words on the Union general Romeyn B. Ayres.
-
great democratic triumph of Wikipedia—its demonstration that people are eager for free and accessible information resources.
-
Even Jimmy Wales, who has been more tolerant of “difficult people” than Sanger, complained about “an unfortunate tendency of disrespect for history as a professional discipline.”
-
Wikipedia's view of history is not only more anecdotal and colorful than professional history, it is also—again like much popular history—more factualist.
-
the problem of Wikipedian history is not that it disregards the facts but that it elevates them above everything else and spends too much time and energy (in the manner of many collectors) on organizing those facts into categories and lists.