World History
Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. This article is from the Journal of American History, Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46. It was written by Roy Rosenzweig.
Obviously, this article deals with the coverage of history on Wikipedia. This resource may not be the creation of professional historians but it is the most read history resource in the world. The author writes that Wikipedia surpasses other popular encyclopedias in breadth but is inferior in both depth and breadth to professional reference sources such as American National Biography. Rosenzweig argues for opening up these kinds of professional history sources so that the general searcher can find them.
This is an excellent and thought provoking article. I believe that it will cause many to rethink how the work of professional historians is spread to researchers.
From the site:
History is a deeply individualistic craft. The singly authored work is the standard for the profession; only about 6 percent of the more than 32,000 scholarly works indexed since 2000 in this journal?s comprehensive bibliographic guide, ?Recent Scholarship,? have more than one author. Works with several authors?common in the sciences?are even harder to find. Fewer than 500 (less than 2 percent) have three or more authors.1
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.?2 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.
A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture. Yet, quite remarkably, that describes the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which contains 3 million articles (1 million of them in English). History is probably the category encompassing the largest number of articles. Wikipedia is entirely free. And that freedom includes not just the ability of anyone to read it (a freedom denied by the scholarly journals in, say, jstor, which requires an expensive institutional subscription) but also?more remarkably?their freedom to use it. You can take Wikipedia?s entry on Franklin D. Roosevelt and put it on your own Web site, you can hand out copies to your students, and you can publish it in a book?all with only one restriction: You may not impose any more restrictions on subsequent readers and users than have been imposed on you. And it has no authors in any conventional sense. Tens of thousands of people?who have not gotten even the glory of affixing their names to it?have written it collaboratively. The Roosevelt entry, for example, emerged over four years as five hundred authors made about one thousand edits. This extraordinary freedom and cooperation make Wikipedia the most important application of the principles of the free and open-source software movement to the world of cultural, rather than software, production.3
- See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, The Cia, A Campaign
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Encyclopaedia Britannica's Guide to Normandy 1944 - The story of the Normandy Invasion through the spoken recollections of veterans who fought it, the newsreels that recorded the events, and written collections of historians who studied the campaign....
- Wikinfo - Primary Source
Primary source. This is an encyclopedia article from Wikinfo which explains what a primary source is. From the site: A primary historical source is any piece of information that was created by someone who witnessed first hand or was part of the...
World History
Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past
Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past. This article is from the Journal of American History, Volume 93, Number 1 (June, 2006): 117-46. It was written by Roy Rosenzweig.Obviously, this article deals with the coverage of history on Wikipedia. This resource may not be the creation of professional historians but it is the most read history resource in the world. The author writes that Wikipedia surpasses other popular encyclopedias in breadth but is inferior in both depth and breadth to professional reference sources such as American National Biography. Rosenzweig argues for opening up these kinds of professional history sources so that the general searcher can find them.
This is an excellent and thought provoking article. I believe that it will cause many to rethink how the work of professional historians is spread to researchers.
From the site:
History is a deeply individualistic craft. The singly authored work is the standard for the profession; only about 6 percent of the more than 32,000 scholarly works indexed since 2000 in this journal?s comprehensive bibliographic guide, ?Recent Scholarship,? have more than one author. Works with several authors?common in the sciences?are even harder to find. Fewer than 500 (less than 2 percent) have three or more authors.1
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.?2 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.
A historical work without owners and with multiple, anonymous authors is thus almost unimaginable in our professional culture. Yet, quite remarkably, that describes the online encyclopedia known as Wikipedia, which contains 3 million articles (1 million of them in English). History is probably the category encompassing the largest number of articles. Wikipedia is entirely free. And that freedom includes not just the ability of anyone to read it (a freedom denied by the scholarly journals in, say, jstor, which requires an expensive institutional subscription) but also?more remarkably?their freedom to use it. You can take Wikipedia?s entry on Franklin D. Roosevelt and put it on your own Web site, you can hand out copies to your students, and you can publish it in a book?all with only one restriction: You may not impose any more restrictions on subsequent readers and users than have been imposed on you. And it has no authors in any conventional sense. Tens of thousands of people?who have not gotten even the glory of affixing their names to it?have written it collaboratively. The Roosevelt entry, for example, emerged over four years as five hundred authors made about one thousand edits. This extraordinary freedom and cooperation make Wikipedia the most important application of the principles of the free and open-source software movement to the world of cultural, rather than software, production.3
- See Who's Editing Wikipedia - Diebold, The Cia, A Campaign
The CIA edits at Wikipedia. So do Congressional staffers and people working for companies trying to better the article about their employer or make a competitor's article worse. All of this has been suspected for years but now there is proof. John...
- Citizendium - An Alternative To Wikipedia?
I read in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education that there is a move being made to create an alternative to Wikipedia. It is called Citizendium. Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, is attempting to create an academic version...
- Encyclopaedia Britannica Is Seeking Blogger Support
I received this e-mail yesterday from Rodney Waldoff of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It partially reads: Hello Miland. You don't know me, but I wear the "community czar" hat at Encyclopaedia Britannica. My role is to develop tools and content that...
- Encyclopaedia Britannica's Guide To Normandy 1944
Encyclopaedia Britannica's Guide to Normandy 1944 - The story of the Normandy Invasion through the spoken recollections of veterans who fought it, the newsreels that recorded the events, and written collections of historians who studied the campaign....
- Wikinfo - Primary Source
Primary source. This is an encyclopedia article from Wikinfo which explains what a primary source is. From the site: A primary historical source is any piece of information that was created by someone who witnessed first hand or was part of the...