Wikipedia, the free internet based encyclopedia, has become an integral part of the way that people learn and obtain new information. When trying to find information on a particular topic, one of the first places people will turn to is Wikipedia. In the almost twenty years since the site was launched in 2001, Wikipedia has received both high praise and frequent criticism. Since this source is so widely used for retrieving information, there are naturally questions about the quality of the information contained on the site.
Articles on Wikipedia are created through a method called crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing means that articles are created and later edited by many different contributors. Anyone can sign up to become a contributor on Wikipedia, there is no particular background or expertise needed. This has led many people to become skeptical about the accuracy of the information contained on the site. However, Roy Rosenzweig in his article “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” tests just how accuracy of the information contained in Wikipedia articles. Rosenzweig finds that when compared to other other encyclopedias such as Encyclopedia Britannica, the information in Wikipedia is just as accurate.
While Rosenzweig found the information in the articles that he read through to be accurate, it is important to ask and keep in mind a series of questions that can be used when reading any particular article on Wikipedia. Each page on Wikipedia has different tabs that the user can click on to learn more about what edits have been made to the page, when the page was created, who are the people that have edited the page, what changes did individuals make to the page, and what were some additions or changes to the page that people disagreed on. In my own personal work I read through the Wikipedia page for digital humanities and used these questions to dig deeper into this page and the information that it contained.
On the top right hand side of every Wikipedia page there is a tab that says view history. When you click on this tab it allows you to view every edit that has been made to page since it was created. If you click on a particular edit, and see what the page looked liked after that edit was made. Looking at the different edits that were made over time allows the changes that were made to the page to be overserved and the user can see how the page has developed and the role that different users have played in the changes to the page. For the page on digital humanities, I was able to find that it was created in January 2006 and observe the how the page went from just a three sentence definition of digital humanities, to a complete overview of the different elements that make up the field.
The history tab also allows the reader to view the statistics about the page. This is located where it says External tools: Page statistics. Under the statistics, there is a list of the top editors for the page by their username. On the list of editors, it tells you how many time a user has edited the page along with the first and most recent time they have made an edit. If you click on a username, it will give you a little bit about that user, such as their background or areas of expertise. For the page on digital humanities, I found that most of the top 10 contributors to the page had either a professional or educational background in the humanities. They had either research positions in digital humanities at universities or had graduate degrees in humanities. These contributors were individuals that had expert and professional knowledge of what goes into and makes up the field of digital humanities from actively working in the field. Looking at the background of the contributors allows the reader to assess whether or not they are knowledgeable about the topic discussed in the page or not.
Finally, it is up to the reader to build on the base knowledge gained from reading a Wikipedia page. Wikipedia is meant to provide a general overview and background knowledge of a topic. In order to fully understand a topic, more reading outside of Wikipedia must be done. Wikipedia itself provides a list of sources where the reader can go to find more information. On the page about digital humanities, Wikipedia provides a bibliography of dozens of scholarly articles about the field of digital humanities along with external links to different digital humanities centers. The reader can use Wikipedia as a starting point to branch out to discover these scholarly sources to gain a more through understanding of a topic.
