Should scholars edit Wikipedia?

There was an interesting story on NPR's Morning Edition yesterday about a historian (Timothy Messer-Kruse) who tried editing an article in Wikipedia, only to have his changes immediately reversed as soon as he made them. The article concerned the Haymarket affair, when rioters at a labor demonstration in Chicago in 1866 tossed a bomb at police and several people were killed. Evidently Messer-Kruse found some evidence that the standard version of this event, as told in history textbooks, may not be entirely correct. He thinks his attempted revision of the Wikipedia entry was reversed for ideological reasons. The Haymarket affair has been an important part of labor history, and partisans of organized labor apparently did not approve of Messer-Kruse's version of events.

The NPR story mentions an interesting-looking book that I have not seen yet:

Weinberger, David
    2012    Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room is the Room. Basic Books, New York.

The story brought mind my own encounter with this kind of ideological editing on Wikipedia, involving the entry for City.  I posted the following comment on the NPR site:


"This story points out the weakness of Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information. I am an archaeologist, an expert on ancient cities, and I used to work on Wikipedia entries within my domain of expertise to improve them and correct errors. But then I ran up against an ideological roadblock. Revered urban planner Jane Jacobs had claimed (against all fact) that early cities preceded agriculture. This is a silly error to an archaeologist, a no-brainer. There is not a single reputable archaeological work that supports Jacobs's view on this small point. But there is a cult of Jane Jacobs, and members believe that anything she said must be true. After having my corrections of this minor empirical error reversed several times by a cult-member, I gave up editing Wikipedia.

But Wikipedia has become a major reference source for millions of people. Should I just turn my back and ignore it because of its obvious scholarly problems? Or should I still try to work to improve it as I can? Is this worth my time? Anything I add to Wikipedia (so long as I avoid cults or ideological topics, I guess) will be read by many many more people than read my scholarly books and articles. As a scholar, I find this difficult territory to negotiate. Thanks for the interesting story."


Also, see my earlier post, where (at the end of the post) I suggest that "wrong information from amateurs is fine for Wikipedia, but not correct information from scholars."

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