Editing in public: Online identity and the Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
15 January 2015 – Steven Anderson
Recently I attended two “Wikipedia Edit-a-thons.” The name evoked images of committed scholars and students gathered together to pursue an all-nighter that would generate scores of new articles, hundreds of meaningful edits. What actually transpired was the opportunity to address questions of public history and online scholarly identity.
Academics and library professionals have a wealth of information at their fingertips, which is certainly an advantage for contributing to the online encyclopedia. Along with this expertise and access to information, though, can come a strong feeling of ownership, or “possessive individualism” surrounding the articles and edits. [1]
Wikipedia is not a closed resource, of course, and sometimes perfectly sound articles are edited into something less than scholarly. Along with digital vandalism, the reasons for below-par contributions can vary widely. In some cases, the contributor is someone with poor source material. In other cases the contributor is someone just looking for “lulz” or laughs by causing trouble for others.
The Randy in Boise idea suggests that a relentless Wikipedia editor may argue that undead skeletons fought in the Peloponnesian War. Photo credit: Wikipedia
There’s also the so-called “Randy in Boise” problem–a fictitious person used to illustrate the difficulties that can arise when edits go wrong. Randy in Boise, as the example in Wikipedia goes, might feel strongly about an army of undead skeleton-soldiers fighting in the Peloponnesian War and how their exclusion from Wikipedia needs to be corrected. Convincing Randy otherwise could be very time consuming, and it can be difficult for some contributors to let go of an article and focus elsewhere.
Along with the effort that goes into making Wikipedia a useful resource is the question of identity. Many topics on Wikipedia are extremely contentious, with valid supporting information provided for both sides of an explosive subject. It can be difficult to refrain from making edits to what appears to be incorrect or misleading information, and care should be taken in addressing these subjects. This is not to say that contentious topics should be avoided. It is more to say that contributing to Wikipedia is a public act, and that the identity of the Wikipedian stays with the article indefinitely.
The first Edit-a-thon workshop I attended was held at the University of California Riverside Library, which has been holding Wikipedia Edit-a-thons for some time. The current Wikipedia Visiting Scholar for UCR is Chris Troutman, who was on hand in the morning to answer questions and to give a general overview of Wikipedia. The other Edit-a-thon I attended was at a THATCamp held in Dearborn, Michigan. This was during the SHOT annual conference (Society for the History of Technology), and The Henry Ford Museum graciously provided the workshop with space in Greenfield Village.
The general custom in Wikipedia is for one person to use one account. This can be problematic if, for example, someone is making edits one day as a public historian or librarian working for a university and another day on a subject of purely personal interest. It is impossible to divide the two areas without using multiple accounts. The problem with having multiple accounts, though, is the possibility of “sock puppetry,” wherein one person controls multiple user identities and creates conversations among them to limit or redirect discussion.
The work around here is that would-be contributors can use one account in a functional role–identifying oneself as a representative of an institution, for example–and then either use a personal account or work anonymously on articles of personal interest where privacy could be a serious concern. To avoid sock puppetry, however, one must take care to avoid overlapping his contributions on articles and discussions. The discussion of separate accounts helped lessen the tension surrounding privacy at the Edit-a-thon, and it was an option we could present to students working on Wikipedia projects in the classroom as well.
The ThatCAMP Edit-a-thon was similar. There were many questions, and none of us were seasoned Wikipedians. For example, we had difficulty uploading a logo image since no one had an “autoconfirmed” Wikipedia account. This led some participants to create accounts on the spot, and a discussion about usernames and online identity ensued.
Besides these initial complications, there was an interesting conversation about the lack of scholarly and professional hierarchy on Wikipedia. Some of the participants felt that the contributions of public historians and museum professionals should carry more weight, and they were concerned that their edits would be overwritten or deleted without justification. With this in mind it’s important to remember that “writing for Wikipedia is making a contribution, not being an author,” and that it takes many contributions from different perspectives to produce good articles. [2]
Other participants wanted to add information to the site that they knew offhand, but this would be considered “original research” without an accompanying citation. On top of these issues was the matter of how to encode information in Wikipedia. Rather than XML or HTML, Wikipedia uses “Wiki markup,” and this became another hurdle for the group to manage. Adding to all of this confusion, Edit-a-thon participants were working on the same article at the same time, which created “edit conflicts” that the Wikipedia software could not automatically resolve–some edits were lost, others were saved. In the end, the trouble the group had with contributing to Wikipedia was a valuable experience. It was much better to address these issues at the THATCamp among friends and fellow neophytes than in front of a large class of students or in front of colleagues who might not be receptive to the learning process.
Overall, attending these two Edit-a-thons allowed me to see how people work with Wikipedia, what their expectations are, and how they might become frustrated through the process. As it turned out, the Edit-a-thons did not serve the function of generating massive amounts of new articles or making vast numbers of edits. Instead, the Edit-a-thons were a place to get started, to ask questions, and to make mistakes as well as to meet others with a common curiosity about editing in public. Wikipedia is a powerful tool, especially for engaging with public history, and becoming a more proficient contributor will help in using Wikipedia more effectively in the classroom and beyond.
[1] 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.
[2] Amanda Seligman, “Teaching Wikipedia without Apologies,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, eds. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013),128.
~ Steven G. Anderson is a PhD candidate in 20th Century American History at UC Riverside, and he is active in the Digital Humanities. He blogs at Steven G. Anderson and tweets at @sgahistory
Edit-a-thons are a way for those curious about Wikipedia to become acquainted with how it works. In such a context, it’s unlikely to create massive loads of articles because most people are still learning how and what to write.
I have attended edit-a-thons where most people present knew what they were practiced editors — under such circumstances, we did create a lot of articles. So I recommend sticking with it – and perhaps you will eventually attend (or create) an edit-a-thon that meets your expectations of getting more information into articles.
Fascinating and thought-provoking article. I would add to the types of “digital vandalism” you mentioned a different type of edit: imagineering. I’ve written several H@W posts about gentrification, history, and structural racism in an Atlanta suburb. I’ve also written about these issues for other publications, including a national magazine’s blog. When a citation to my Tikkun Daily article was added to the community’s Wikipedia page (by a robot or by the page’s primary editor) a resident elected to delete the citation. Because Wikipedia publishes the IP address for all people making changes to pages, I know it is the same person who has gone to unlawfully extreme lengths (e.g., cyberstalking; a county magistrate issued a temporary protective order for me against this woman under the state’s stalking statute) to “set the story straight,” as she once wrote. The folks in this community, and perhaps other places with similar values and interests in preserving a particular public identity, used Wikipedia in this instance to stay on message about the city and to erase information that conflicts with that message and identity.
Open “source history” is a wonderful way to engage people interested in history but there are some serious questions we need to be asking about the Internet as a source for raw historical information. Whether it’s accidentally or intentionally inaccurate Wikipedia entries or sites that publish/retain inaccurate historical narratives not fact-checked or peer-reviewed (e.g., local historical societies, government agencies, blogs), there are lots of organizations that offer the imprimatur of accuracy and authenticity without divulging to visitors that things like cultural resource management reports may be outdated or subsequently found to have significant and fatal factual flaws. Case in point from my own public history practice involves local historic site designation reports published on a local planning agency’s website that public hearings and subsequent research showed to be inaccurate and not legally defensible. Yet, some of these reports remain published on the agency’s website with no explanatory information on the pages providing the links or in the PDF files themselves indicating that the information is not reliable, e.g., factual.
If the Internet really is the wild, wild west, what’s the the sheriff who rides into town to clean things up going to look like? Will it be one of us working in the field or will it be someone like the woman in Georgia imagineering her community?