Wikipedia in the History Survey

[first posted on my teaching blog, History Survey, on 8/27/07]

Wikipedia offers one-stop shopping for information of all kinds. Need to know when the first man landed on the moon? Type moon landing into Wikipedia and you have your answer. Or maybe you hear about the women's suffrage movement, but have no idea what that means. Here again, Wikipedia can be useful. But you probably know this already. As far as as most students today are concerned, Wikipedia has always been around. Founded in 2001, it has been a constant companion through high school and into college.

You have probably also had teachers tell you not to use it for research, which is good advice. After all, anybody can write in Wikipedia, and they do not have to know anything about the subject. They just have to be interested and motivated enough to write. Nonetheless, I too use Wikipedia to look up quick dates, names, and events. Sometimes I even read the articles. There is nothing wrong with this practice. Indeed, I hope that you use Wikipedia often when you run across people and events with which you are not familiar. It does not get all the facts right, but eventually users catch the worst errors and smooth the way for the next reader. That is often good enough for a first look at something, even if it is not the foundation of good research.

At college you learn how to evaluate the credibility of evidence in books and other sources. You get some help from your professors, who preselect books and help you to analyze them. In the library you can develop a feel for the quality of scholarship in books by studying their forwards, bibliographies, and citations. These things tell you about the authors' qualifications and sources. You might also notice that some books are published by academic presses or other publishers with a good reputation. Such publishers will subject manuscripts to peer review, in order to see if the work is up to standard. None of these factors will guarantee that a book is without fault, but at least you can know if the work has been vetted by other experts and you can even check the available evidence yourself.

Did you know that you can apply some of these reading and research skills to Wikipedia articles? What kind of sources do they cite? How good is that literature? You can also learn something by clicking on the "discussion" tab of a Wikipedia article. There you will often see the article's contributors talking about possible mistakes, problematic interpretations, sources, and so on. The process is far from perfect, but the discussion feature can reveal potential issues of which you were not aware. And guess what? You can contribute to Wikipedia yourself. Just remember to cite the books in which you double-checked your facts.`

So does Wikipedia have a place in a university history survey course? Yes and no. If you run across unfamiliar names and events in your readings or outside activities, I expect you to look them up, and Wikipedia can be quite useful as a first step. But sometimes you will have to visit the library too.