Midd history department v. Wikipedia

You might have noticed that a fair number of the articles in the news feed to the right deal with the Middlebury history department Wikipedia debate (or at least they will — I’m a little behind on the newsgathering because of a lack of internet, and there seems to be a delay between when I post things to my del.icio.us feed and when they show up here). From this, you might have inferred that it’s a debate that is pretty interesting to me both because of my connection with Middlebury and because of my general interest in things related to new media, access to information, and free culture. Some of you have probably heard me talk about it, too, to the point where I started to get the feeling that people are scared to bring it up for fear I’ll get upset. So I’m putting it in the blog, along with links to some relevant coverage and more-articulate arguments than I can make here. Comments are welcome (really), and if you hear me out I promise I’ll post about beaches and caipirinhas or something like that soon. Also, if anyone knows anything that would disprove my guess that Midd students are mostly just ambivalent about the whole issue, I’d love to hear it.

For those of you who haven’t followed the media stampede, the whole thing got started when the Middlebuy history department issued a pronouncement last month that singled out Wikipedia as “suffer[ing] from inaccuracies” and therefore unsuitable for citation (the text is available here at Jason Mittell’s blog, along with some good analysis and a very interesting alternate proposal on Wikipedia use. Full disclosure: Jason was my advisor at Midd . The college put out some sort of press release about it, and it snowballed from there, to (at last count) articles in Inside Higher Education and the New York Times. It’s rare that Middlebury makes the news like this, and for me it’s embarassing on several levels. First, as a former student, I am disturbed by the fact that encyclopedia-citing is apparently so widespread that this debate came up at all. Second, it’s unfortunate that the professors in question chose to take the easy way out by discouraging a useful information tool rather than teaching students how to use it responsibly. And third, that judging from Middlebury’s own coverage of the pronouncement (for example, in MIDDnews, where they bragged about the national media coverage resulting from the decision), the college — or at least its publicity department — apparently sees nothing wrong with this.

Before we start, let’s get one thing straight: there are very, very few people (and I am certainly not one) who would argue that everything on Wikipedia should be taken at face value or used in academic writing without further investigation, verification, and research. Wikipedia can be a tool for gathering information and a starting point for research, but it is not an infallible fountain of truth (if indeed there is such a thing). But just saying that “wikipedia is not an acceptable citation” is not enough. In some cases — in many cases (because why are college students citing encyclopedias of any sort?) — it is certainly true. But singling out Wikipedia because of its “unique manner of compilation” is an unfortunate way to address the larger issue at stake.

It’s true that Wikipedia is (for now) a pretty unique source of information: both uniquely useful and uniquely complicated. But by prohibiting rather than educating, the history department takes the easy way out. A much more proactive solution — and one more in keeping with the college’s responsibility to teach students how to learn, rather than just stuffing them full of facts — would be to help students understand about how wikipedia works, allowing them to decide for themselves whether a given piece of information is reliable, while at the same time clearly stating that they are ultimately responsible for what they write. The ability to gather and cite information and to understand the pros and cons of various information sources is one of the most important skills for any college student or aspiring scholar.

In this context, singling out Wikipedia as unreliable without explaining why seems not only to miss the point of teaching students how to learn, but to be actively counterproductive. If students don’t understand the reasons for the department’s directive (which they are not likely to, unless professors take it upon themselves to “teach wikipedia” and other new technologies by actively integrating them into the classroom) the most likely outcome is not that students stop using Wikipedia, but that they stop citing it — not exactly conducive to rigorous and honest scholarship.

Crucially, it’s the people who don’t fully understand how Wikipedia works who are most likely to misuse it. These people visit www.wikipedia.org and see only the finished product, without understanding the mechanics — the way that pages are built and information is added, the way that sources are cited, the way that assertions are discussed and disputes are resolved, Wikipedia’s guidelines for impartiality and citation, and what goes on behind the scenes, where thousands of dedicated (and arguably slightly obsessive) administrators and editors have contributed to the (at current count) more than 1.6 million articles in the English-language version alone. In other words, thinking of Wikipedia as a finished product is to fundamentally miss the point: one of Wikipedia’s most interesting roles (although not the only one) is as a collaborative conversation about information, rather than a simple repository of facts.

As such, the department’s policy also ignores another indispensable aspect of scholarship: that collaboration and information-sharing is inherent in all research and that it is the responsibility of academics to give back to society. One of the most exciting things about new media such as Wikipedia is their ability to broaden and deepen the abilities of both the academic and non-academic communities to access, understand, and contribute to the expansion of human knowledge. Failing to grasp this — and consequently failing to instill in students a respect for, and feeling of responsibility toward, society at large — is to fail in one of the most important duties of teaching. When Professor Waters (as quoted in the New York Times) found an inaccurate statement in the article on Japanese history, why didn’t he fix it? After all, Wikipedia — much more than most sources of information — is only as good as its users.

2 sides of Rio

Rio is hotter than I’ve ever seen it — bright, beautiful, and sunny. Perfect beach weather, if I were a beach kind of person, and definitely a nice change from the sub-zero temps and freezing slush of Iowa and Boston (I’m only gloating a little bit, I promise). I’m staying in Humaita, a really nice neighborhood a little bit away from the beach but near Botafogo and FGV, with another Fulbrighter, Teresa, who is working on her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins. Teresa is fantastic, and all in all the only disadvantage to the apartment is the neighbor, semi-affectionately known before I came as “death metal dude” but who has now earned the additional nickname of “weird voyeur dude.” Growing up in southeast Iowa doesn’t quite prepare you for the charms of close high-rise proximity.

It’s hard to describe how it feels being back in Rio, and knowing that this time I’m going to be here for awhile. It’s both exciting and unnerving — kind of like the city itself, I guess. Rio is without a doubt a city of contrast, and this never hit me as forcefully as it did on Saturday night, when I went to Beth’s (another Fulbrighter) going away churrasco in Rio’s largest favela, Rocinha. A churrasco is basically a Brazilian barbecue, and whether you are in a penthouse in Botafogo or on the roof of a cramped apartment in Rocinha it involves the same ritual — stuffing your face with all kinds of grilled meat over several hours while hanging out with friends. But the view from the roof in Rocinha is very different than anywhere else I’ve been in the city. I’d always wanted to visit the favelas, but had stopped short of going on the favela “tours,” which (somewhat disturbingly — to me at least) involve safari-like Range Rovers with bars on the windows.

Favelas are the slums or shantytowns that dot the hillsides around Rio, often interspersed with middle or upper-class neighborhoods. On Saturday evening we took the bus from Humaita to the edge of Rocinha, where Beth met us. Climbing the hill was like entering a different city entirely — narrow, crooked streets crowded with people, music blaring from the corner bars, eateries, and small shops. The drug gangs put cement blocks in the street to keep the police cars out, so except for the occasional motorbike, it was all pedestrians. We turned right, across a footbridge over an open sewer and into a maze of narrow walkways running between the houses. Most of the buildings are 2 or 3 stories and made out of cement; the way they look, sprouting out of the hillside, reminded me a little bit of Mexico.

Rocinha has better infrastructure than some of the favelas in Rio, with roads, and electricity and running water available in nearly all areas. But it’s still a far cry from the better-off areas of Zona Sul. The last churrascoI went to in Brazil was an apartment in Botafogo. We were on the roof there, too, but the view was completely different. There was Rio sprawled in all its skyrise glamour, with the Cristo floating like a ghost in and out of the clouds, car headlights speeding along below, and the bay of Botafogo a dark blob in the middle of the bright lights of office and apartment buildings. Rocinha by night is different. There was less a sound of traffic and more of human voices — shouting, laughing — and music. We could see other people on their roofs and other parties in progress. Instead of looking down on the city we were looking up, and the lights of the favela twinkled all around and all the way up into the hills behind the house. It felt less glamourous but more intimate, more personal, on a more human scale.

Later, Beth walked us back to the bus stop at the edge of the favela. By night, Rocinha is just as busy, if a little strange. We passed drug dealers toting machine guns in the street — my blase world-traveler side had to work pretty hard to keep my Iowa-girl side from jumping about a foot when I realized what they were — and a couple of drug points. It’s part of life in the favelas, I guess. But there are other parts to favela life, too. As we exited, we saw 6 or 8 police cars wih a corresponding number of police officers lounging around and hanging out in a nearby bar. It’s a complicated, and very interdependent social world — hard for outsiders to understand, but everyone who lives there knows the rules. When I mentioned this to Beth, she shrugged and said the rules were pretty simple: don’t look too closely and don’t take any pictures. The police are always there, but they’re paid off and won’t cause trouble. The only time you need to worry, she said, is if you see policemen you don’t recognize — it might be a sting operation, and it’s better to stay away until it’s over.

We got on the bus, and pretty soon were back in Humaita, with the cars and the wide quiet street and tiled sidewalks and the doorman waiting to open the door for us and ask us how the night had gone. Rio is like that, full of contrasts: more than any city I’ve ever been in, it feels alive. The city is conflicted, friendly, crazy, ambitious — troubled, yes, but fiercely proud at the same time.

new stuff

I know, I’m a few posts and promises behind when it comes to keeping things up here. This particular lapse is easily explained by the fact that I haven’t been feeling very interesting lately, but I’m also realizing that I start out more than half of my posts by apologizing for how long it’s been since the last time I wrote anything. In the spirit of February, which is when you get rid of New Year’s Resolutions that didn’t work out, I’ve decided to accept that I may never be as reliable about posting as I’d like. So as a compromise, I’ve been trying to make sure that all 6 of you who still check this thing will have something to look at even if I’m really bad about writing anything new.

With that as intro, you’ll notice that I made a couple of changes to the right sidebar –> specifically, I added a link to my deli.cio.us rss feed, so that even if you can’t read what I’m writing, you can at least read what I’m reading. Since wasting time looking up random trivia online has never been at all difficult for me, I’m expecting that there will be new stuff in the feed pretty often.

I also added a list — to be expanded shortly — of blogs and sites that I visit frequently. Almost all of these have some connection (direct or indirect) to issues like copyright/intellectual property in general, development, open-source projects of all kinds (not just software), and the like. A few are in Spanish or Portuguese, but there’s plenty to look at in English as well. And unlike this blog, they are all updated extremely regularly and are more than interesting.

And finally, since you sat through all that so patiently, here’s a quick update: I got back from Boston a week ago and I’m leaving for Brazil tomorrow evening to start 10 months of research in Rio de Janeiro, one of my favorite cities in the world. Aside from some visa issues, which slightly delayed my travel plans, and the institutionalized torture ritual otherwise known as the LSATs, it’s been a fantastic few weeks — I loved Boston, I loved the Berkman Center, I loved seeing so many old friends and Middkids.

Being at home is pretty nice too. And now I’m going to go pack.