Hello,<br><br>I'm interested in ways that people have successfully managed to use Wikipedia in the classroom. Japan studies--history, in specific--surfaced as the most "concerned" party in an article in the NYT this week, that I imagine many people saw. (The Guardian ran a piece on February 7:
<a href="http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/columnist/story/0,,2006932,00.html">http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/columnist/story/0,,2006932,00.html</a>) <br><br>The NYT story begins:<br><br><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">
<span style="font-weight: bold;">A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source</span><br>By NOAM COHEN<br></blockquote><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">
Published: February 21, 2007<br></blockquote><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">When half a dozen students in Neil Waters's Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in "no position to aid a revolution," he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.
<br></blockquote><br><blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it up cramming for his exam....(
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/education/21wikipedia.html">http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/education/21wikipedia.html</a>)<br></blockquote><br>It's true that there is a lot of dud information on Wiki. Many of the Japan entries in English are a shambles of contradiction, infinite loops of the same cut-and-pastes, unattributed paraphrase of opinion presented as an empirical claim, etc. And there are what one might consider to be fundamental anachronisms, if not flaws, in the basic way of organising information: the chronology, and nineteenth-century narrative. This consists of: geohistory-->population history-->cultural history that organised Hippolyte Taine's
<span style="text-decoration: underline;">History of English Literature</span> (among many other historically oriented works), which in turn was institutionalised in Meiji Japan, and also organises the <span style="text-decoration: underline;">
CIA Fact Book</span>, not necessarily the user-friendly archive that most open source advocates would like to affiliate with. Moreover, the nineteenth-century purist models of national cinema and national language are amplified are reproduced yet again in this 21st medium, in the national "versioning" of Wiki oeuvres. Lately, I have been following some very interesting discussions on how Dutch words have not been allowed in "English-language" blog entries because of this "national language" policy. (This policy seems, while well-intended for purposes of inclusion, to actually have the effect of creating an English-only space which to me resonates uncomfortably with certain immigration policies afoot in the US, perhaps elsewhere in the English-speaking world.)
<br><br>However, I have seen some very good articles by scientists on Wiki, that manage to take on conceptual issues and paradigm shifts in knowledge by using that very same format, the chronology. See "plate tectonics," for example (
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics</a><br>). The difference seems to be that the chronology was generated by a controversy, or an awareness of a shift in how to explain how something works. Thus a narrative is enabled, in a way that is rare to see, even in writing about culture and humanities.
<br><br>An example of the humanities/culture writing that crystallises the anachronistic "chronology/destiny" school of writing is the entry on Lafcadio Hearn (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafcadio_Hearn">
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafcadio_Hearn</a>). <br><br>In contrast, the entry on Uchida Kûichi is one example of the "chronology/destiny" school that is extremely well-researched, contains multiple sources from different fields (history of photography in books, magazines and journals, books of photography, on-line sources, etc.). It is something of a compromise position, in that it maintains the numbing narrative structure that has long dogged literary studies, of the "what color was Soseki's dog" variety. Here, it means a narrative organised according to birthplace, apprenticeship, names and dates of Uchida's various peripatetic movements, other media forms
<span style="font-style: italic;">about</span> him, and cause of death, etc. It does, however, interpret what is significant about Uchida's work--he was the only photographer allowed to capture the Meiji emperor.<br><br>
These contexts of debate, precedent and pattern spurred me to ask if people on the list might have suggestions for models of humanities/culture writing on Wiki that actually takes advantage of the format/medium to assemble entries that are rich in both "information" and argument, and link in significant ways to on-line sources. How can creative writing and editing be brought into line with, and on line with, responsible historiography? How can the hybrid properties of Wiki be exploited to make it contemporary, rather than an extension of the long 19th century?
<br><br>I'd be interested in any links, strategies, models, contexts for other debates and "national" Wikis, etc. And, of course, corrections, or references to other stages of the process (editing, establishing styles, etc) that I did not mention. Thanks for any leads!
<br><br>Anne<br>