Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past
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"Can History Be Open Source?" is an article written by digital history guru Roy Rosenzweig, founder of the Center for History and New Media and historian at George Mason University. This article appeared in The Journal of American History in June of 2006.
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Summary
Rosenzweig begins the article by defining history as a "deeply individual individualistic craft". The vast majority of historical studies are written by three or fewer authors, and authors are required to cite sources from and attribute ideas to any other historical author that might have been compiled during research. With its open-source, collaborative nature, one would imagine that Wikipedia would be unable to function as a useful tool for modern historians. However, as Rosenzweig argues, Wikipedia has over 3 million articles, accessible to the more than one million visitors to the site. Rosenzweig profiles the founding of Wikipedia in March 2000 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, who met through "their joint participation in online mailing lists and Usenet discussion groups devoted to Ayn Rand and objectivism." Rosenzweig then goes on to discuss how Wikipedia changed as it gained popularity. According to Rosenzweig, one rule has remained unchanged throughout Wikipedia's history, which is that the articles are to be written in "neutral point of view" (NPOV). Wikipedia features on-going discussions on how contributors can maintain that view. Rosenzweig also compares Wikipedia to similar online encyclopedias, like Britannica and American National Biography Online, with varying results. According to Rosenzweig, Wikipedia tends to be less accurate than American National Biography Online, but more comprehensive than Encyclopedia Britannica. Overall, Rosenzweig seems impressed with Wikipedia's success, given the parameters under which it functions.
Selected Quotations
"Historical scholarship is also characterized by possessive individualism. Good professional practice (and avoiding charges of plagiarism) requires us to attribute ideas and words to specific historians—we are taught to speak of "Richard Hofstadter's status anxiety interpretation of Progressivism." And if we use more than a limited number of words from Hofstadter, we need to send a check to his estate. To mingle Hofstadter's prose with your own and publish it would violate both copyright and professional norms."
"Overall, writing is the Achilles' heel of Wikipedia. Committees rarely write well, and Wikipedia entries often have a choppy quality that results from the stringing together of sentences or paragraphs written by different people. Some Wikipedians contribute their services as editors and polish the prose of different articles. But they seem less numerous than other types of volunteers. Few truly gifted writers volunteer for Wikipedia. Encarta, while less comprehensive than Wikipedia, generally offers better—especially, more concise—writing."
"One reason professional historians need to pay attention to Wikipedia is because our students do. A student contributor to an online discussion about Wikipedia noted that he used the online encyclopedia to study the historical terms for a test on early romanticism in Britain. Other students routinely list it in term paper bibliographies. We should not view this prospect with undue alarm. Wikipedia for the most part gets its facts right. (The student of British culture reported that Wikipedia proved as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica and easier to use.) And the general panic about students' use of Internet sources is overblown. You can find bad history in the library, and while much misinformation circulates on the Internet, it also helps to debunk myths and to correct misinformation.
"The difficulties in implementing such a model for professional scholarship are obvious. How would you deal with the interpretative disputes that are at the heart of scholarly historical writing? How would we allocate credit, which is so integral to professional culture? Could you get a promotion based on having "contributed to" a collaborative project? There are no easy solutions. But it is worth noting that contributors to open-source software projects are not motivated simply by altruism."
Access
You can view the full-text version of Rosenzweig's article at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media website, available by clicking here, through the following link.
http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42
Works Cited
Roy Rosenzweig. “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past.” Journal of American History 93.1 (2006): 117-146. Print.
