Wikipedia, thoughts thereon

> Any first year student of history knows that it is important to cite sources.

No, they know they'll get a bad grade if they don't cite sources. Remember how stupid people are, and how immature. Thinking about it that may actually be too elitist, but I'm not sure.

>However, it it takes years of experience and a degree of expertise to cultivate the skills >necessary to critically evaluate and assess the worth and accuracy of sources.

The closer we get to the present day and things people deal with in their daily lives the less true this is. And the nerdier the people who deal with it, the more likely it is to be on wikipedia, and well done. You could get at least three quarters of an undergraduate Computer Science or math curriculum done just with Wiki links. But this also means that articles on historical events of the last twenty years or so will be pretty good (also pretty partisan).

Years of experience are a necessary precondition of expertise except in new fields, so I think that's redundant anyway. Merely by being alive, relatively smart, and plugged into the media and popular culture I'm an expert on media criticism. How is The Guardian trying to shape my views? Or The Times, The Telegraph, CNN, whoever?

Very, very few people care enough about history to "critically evaluate and assess the worth and accuracy of sources." but there are enough of them that once Google gets around to digitising all the world's archives that'll let them, they'll be a plague, an infestation of local, regional, national historians.

What I'm saying is that History is not a science, and getting up to the level of self-reflexive criticism of sources that an average Ph.D. of History is at is well within the capacity of enough people that some hobbyists will do it as a hobby, because they want to take part in the activity of history. I'm a bigger elitist than you are, but a small proportion of a very large number is still a pretty big number. Imagine 10,000 people worldwide taking enough of an interest in history that they could write monographs at say, a taught Masters level, based on the records they can pull up on their screen, people with real jobs, for whom it's just a hobby. That's one in every 600K people. Entirely doable, I think.

>A cursory tour of wikipedia articles dealing with important historical topics would >demonstrate the weakness of the information contained therein.

To be all postmodernist, who decided what was an important historical topic? In all seriousness, surprise, surprise. Most people really don't give a fuck about history. Some of those who care are going to be irritating nationalist or sectarian or other identity groups with an agenda.

>The problem isn't just the references and sources that are present, but especially those that >are absent.

This is going to be a historically limited problem. Publicly funded universities have no business assigning copyright to corporations. Scratch the publicly funded. The academic journal system made sense before email, and as a way of facilitating peer-review it still has a certain charm but open-access journals and preprint archives like arxiv.org.

>I agree with the author of the article that Wikipedia tends to discourage experts who have >knowledge of the kind that is gained over years of painstaking reading and study, rather than >through a few internet clicks.

If you want to improve Wikipedia, improve Wikipedia. This will take time, effort and commitment. If you have better things to do, do those instead. If you have better things to do, but still want to improve it, assign your students to write a wikipedia article you think should exist, but doesn't, with references. (That's a you, an academic, not you, Mick.)

And this is purely a social science and humanities problem, see Chirality. That leads to articles in Physics, Mathematics, Chemistry and Electromgnetism.

>Responding to Heilmann Hurt, I must point out that simply seeing where (online) information >was 'sourced' (i.e. cut and pasted) is simply not enough. Someone has to check the >veracity of those sources, something that would be virtually impossible if the sources were >genuine, paper sources from a library or archive as opposed to trivial digital dribble.

Political Historian. Wait 50 years and someone will be writing their Ph.D. thesis on the contribution of... fuck, Youtube to the abortive Iranian anti-clerical revolution. They're all sources, dude. Being curated, or not, does not a worthy source make.

>A greater degree of elite participation would be helpful,
There are vastly more intelligent college graduate potential editors and contributors than actual editors. It's a reference work not original scholarship, it doesn't need "elite" participation, a II.1 final year undergrad is about as high a level as you need to go, and that level, while not common is not all that rare either.

>as would a system of rating the importance of valuable information in relation to 'noise'.
Tada! http://schools-wikipedia.org/
If you really care, or can convince others to care, you can fork wikipedia, like Citizendium (failure so far), or you could continue to use your good judgement and bullshit detector at all times. That's the way to go. If you know a field, every time you hear someone talk about it you hear idiots. I swear to God, I read a Third Edition of an International Relations introduction anthology and I could point out flaws in the economics in it, really, really stupid flaws. Journalists in particular make lots of mistakes, but that's probably more because they write so much, and so publicly than anything especially stupid about them.

Outside their field of expertise, everyone is a moron. If you can remember that you can use Wikipedia, or any other work as you should, as reference until you can say "I know that for myself"