More scholars calling for Wikipedia involvement

5 May 2007 by sage

After Roy Rosenzweig’s June 2006 article on Wikipedia in The Journal of American History, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past“, I predicted a large-scale change in the way scholars—humanists in particular—view Wikipedia. Things started slowly; Marshall Poe’s September article in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Hive” was the next major piece, and other interesting viewpoints continued to trickle in until the Middlebury College ban.

But lately, calls for involvement and reports of classroom success have been coming in rapidly. Recommended reading:

I’m working on my own piece for historians of science, and I’m trying to kick the inflammatory rhetoric up a notch. I probably need to come up with a catchy title, though. Unfortunately, garden-variety historians and English professors have already melted the obvious Dr. Strangelove snowclone. (What’s up with that? That’s history of science territory!) Maybe I could go with the other Strangelove snowclone: “We must not allow a Wikipedia gap!”

By the way, any suggests for improving the above article would be greatly appreciated; I’ll be submitting it soon.

Possibly related posts:

  1. "We Cannot Allow a Wikipedia Gap!" in Spontaneous Generations
  2. Superb Wikipedia podcast; Ideas for Wikipedia to steal
  3. Wikipedia as a source
  4. HSS meeting in Vancouver, open journals, Wikipedia evangelism
  5. On the Internet, anyone can be a historian

Posted in Wikipedia, academia, garden-variety history, historians, historians of science | 3 Comments »

3 Responses to “More scholars calling for Wikipedia involvement”

  1. ray says:

    cool post.

    if u don’t mind, i’m borrowing your links for my paper. I have to write a final paper for my English class and I chose controversy over Wikipedia.

  2. Sage says:

    The piece I was writing is available from Spontaneous Generations:
    http://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/SpontaneousGenerations/article/view/1017

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