Persistent errors on Wikipedia
Hello all,
I'm starting a research note on a persistent error in a Wikipedia article on an historical subject.
This error seems to have come out of nowhere. I've reviewed thousands of pages of documents relating to this topic, and I have no idea where people got this particular misconception: it seems to have no basis in either academic or popular history.
It's been corrected, but keeps coming back, and has now persisted for so long that it's creeping into scholarly work.
To make matters worse, these scholarly sources are now being cited by the Wikipedia article--so that, in effect, the article is citing itself, in support of its own erroneous claims.
Before I proceed with my research note, I was wondering if anyone else has encountered anything similar to this, in other Wikipedia articles. This case suggests to me that there is a serious flaw in Wikipedia's fact-checking model: it presupposes that nobody is getting their information from Wikipedia itself. And I was wondering if anyone else has noticed something similar, in other historical articles.
(I'm also wondering if I'm late to this party, and if someone else has already pointed this out. Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt!)
Thanks in advance,
D. M. Leeson
Laurentian University
Categories
2 Replies
Post ReplyDavid,
Your query is similar to (but not the same as) the problem of medieval manuscript disease images being mis-identified as plague (Yersinia pestis), both on Wikipedia and elsewhere online. There are at least two articles on the topic that might interest you:
• Lori Jones and Richard Nevell, "Plagued by Doubt and Viral Misinformation: The Need for Evidence-Based Use of Historical Disease Images",Lancet Infectious Diseases 16 (October 2016): e235-40.
• Monica Green, et al., "Diagnosis of a 'Plague' Image: A Digital Cautionary Tale", The Medieval Globe1 (2014): 309-26.
This discussion about the mis-identification of medieval images of plague (and sometimes about medievalisms more broadly) appears periodically on the Medieval Medicine Listserv (https://lists.asu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A0=MEDMED-L).
If you have not already read it, you may also find the following article on history and Wikipedia useful, particularly the sub-section "TheWikipedia Way: How It Works":
• Roy Rosenzweig, "Can History Be Open Source?Wikipedia and the Future of the Past",The Journal of American History 93, no. 1 (June 2006): 117-146.
Good luck!
Dr. Whitney Dirks
Grand Valley State University
Dear All,
Allow me to comment briefly in my capacity as H-Net's current Vice President of Networks. Some academic groups do sponsor "Fix Wikipedia" events that aim at correcting such errors and otherwise improving what is, for better or worse, the most widely used reference source on the planet. In addition to the problems of misinformation referenced above, another is that a corrected Wikipedia entry can always be re-edited to reintroduce the original misinformation.
H-Net Networks can serve as a potential solution to this problem because trained academic editors vet all their content. For example, an individual Network can develop its own webpage of corrections of popular misconceptions, with that webpage going through a process of editorial oversight. We have tried things like this on a small scale, for example, at H-Slavery. The final step would be to edit the relevant Wikipedia articles so that they link to the Network's page of corrections. Typically, Wikipedia frowns on the wholesale deleting of information, so odds are subsequent readers of a relevant Wikipedia entry would always be able to see the reference to the H-Net Network page. The corrected information would reside permanently on the H-Net Network, where it would be safe from tampering while still being subject to appropriate revision.
Just to be clear, I'm not volunteering the editors at H-Albion to take this on, they already do a lot of service for the benefit of this field of study (and thanks to them for doing so!). I did, however, want to mention the possibility by way of underscoring the range of things H-Net Networks can tackle and how they can work toward the academic common good.
Kind Regards,
David Prior
VP of Networks, H-Net
Assistant Professor of History, UNM
vp-net@mail.h-net.msu.edu