American Historical Association, May 2014 link
As an American historian who studies the political economy of the antebellum period, I have always been fascinated by the panic of 1837—a financial cataclysm that is, according to one recent book, deserving of the term “America’s First Great Depression.” During the 2012–13 winter break, I typed “Panic of 1837” in the Wikipedia search field and found a disjointed entry listing only a few secondary sources. This was vexing, to put it mildly. The editors of Wikipedia had flagged the entry for biased or incomplete information and solicited a “specialist” in US history for improvements. I took it upon myself to improve the entry, and in the process I discovered important details behind Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy, the ideologically charged subcultures that often tamper with these entries, and a potential explanation for why I was able to rehabilitate the entry successfully. As recently as two years ago, I was a strident Wikipedia critic, having become frustrated by too many Wikipedia-derived answers on student exams. But as I’ll show further, I have grown more optimistic about Wikipedia’s mission and believe that it embodies many of the values that academics hold dear. Among scholars there is a diverse spectrum of thought on Wikipedia’s utility. Former AHA President William Cronon saw mostly positives in encouraging historians to contribute more to Wikipedia, while Timothy Messer-Kruse’s ordeal underscores the pitfalls of a website that does not distinguish between expert opinion and that of the layperson and whose policy of verifiability precludes content based solely on inaccessible primary sources—making him a vocal Wikipedia critic. My position falls somewhere in between.
As I examined Wikipedia’s Panic of 1837 entry more closely, I noticed that practically all of the authors cited in the reference section were hard-line libertarians. The lone “external reference” was an informally written, selectively sourced paper written by an obscure historian who did not list his credentials and which was delivered at a conference hosted by the Ludwig Von Mises Institute (LVMI), an Alabama-based think tank unaffiliated with any university or independent process of peer review. [...] I spent several days of my winter break adding content and references to the site, and the editors of Wikipedia, presumably having approved my alterations, took down the flag that referred to bias and incomplete information. [...] I more than doubled the number of monographs and peer-reviewed journal articles in the reference ection and deleted very little of the preexisting text even if I deemed it suspect. Instead, I restructured the prose to make it more readable. This formula may not always work, but historians should try as much as possible to write in a descriptive manner on Wikipedia, not an analytical one, though admittedly this is counterintuitive to much of our training and the lines between these categories are not discrete.
Wikipedia skeptics make many valid points. There is no editor-in-chief who makes a final call on content. Collective wisdom may reinforce certain innate biases or prove erroneous over time. [...] Then there is the potential for the very existence of Wikipedia to devalue the artistry and labor of teaching and publishing. A few years ago, I wrote an entry for an encyclopedia project on American slavery with a well-known reference publisher. The editor informed me, after I had completed the piece, that the project would be discontinued indefinitely, in part because of competition from Wikipedia. [...] With the recognition that some of these issues will never go away entirely, I call on historians to dedicate their precious few hours of spare time to improving Wikipedia; as an incentive, I call on administrators to integrate Wikipedia contributions into the publication requirements for tenure. Recently minted PhDs currently face an existential job crisis with the vaunted goal of obtaining a full-time, tenured professorship proving more and more elusive. And here might be a way to enhance one’s CV in preparation for the next job interview. [...]
Stephen W. Campbell is a lecturer at Pasadena City College. His doctoral dissertation, completed in 2013 at UC Santa Barbara, analyzes the intersection of newspapers, financial institutions, and state-building in the antebellum era.
