“You mean, you want us to actually send our essays to Wikipedia,” my students asked. “Yes,” I told them. “That’s the only way they might publish your essay.”
For the last three semesters, I’ve assigned students to write research essays on neglected topics of local history here in Durham—not only for me to read, but for anyone on Wikipedia. Each time I’ve assigned this project, students have a delayed realization half way through the six-week unit that they are actually trying to write an article that will become the Wikipedia essay for their chosen topic. And frankly, it seems to scare them as much as it excites them. They’re doubtful that they can actually produce an essay with enough research and polished writing to go online. Proving them wrong is really the whole point of this assignment.
The deep and broad influence of Wikipedia is undeniable. While there’s no way to measure how many bets have been settled with the site, the web traffic analysis site Alexa recognizes Wikipedia as the sixth-most visited website in the world. Even more striking, Wikipedia is the world’s most visited site that is not Facebook, YouTube, or a search engine.
The idea behind the Wikipedia assignment is simple. It occurred to me two years ago that our students’ adopted home town of Durham, North Carolina was woefully underrepresented on Wikipedia. Durham was for decades the center of the world’s cigarette industry; it was home to one of the largest concentrations of African American businesses, known as Black Wall Street; and vital; and it had a long and vital civil rights movement that extended at least as far back as the 1930s.
Much of this history was missing from Wikipedia, however, just two years ago. This was all the more surprising considering that Durham’s history has been the subject of at least half a dozen scholarly books and many more articles and book chapters, including Leslie Brown’s Upbuilding Black Durham, Christina Greene’s Our Separate Ways, and Jean Anderson’s Durham County. As of fall 2012, neither the Royal Ice Cream Sit-In of 1957, one of the country’s earliest civil rights sit-ins, nor the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, once the largest African American business in the country, had Wikipedia entries. Meanwhile, some entries, like the one for the once dominant Bull Durham tobacco, were just two or three sentences long.
In my classes, students learn about local history not as something that only experts research and understand, but as a public good that citizens are responsible for preserving and promoting. It has never been easier for citizens to write about history publicly, to offer their own interpretations of the past without the approval of academic editors, professional historians, and prevailing political opinion. But inequalities in the study of history still persist. Many meaningful historical topics are widely ignored or attacked online. I want students to actually try to make the telling and analysis of local history more accessible and more democratic, particularly by submitting essays to Wikipedia for publication.
Almost a decade ago, the late Roy Rosenzweig published “Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past,” arguably the first major piece of writing by an academic historian treating Wikipedia as a valid, and even necessary, publishing outlet for people who want to improve the wider public’s understanding of history. As Rosenzweig argued, “if historians believe that what is available free on the Web is low quality, then we have a responsibility to make better information sources available online [and]…a professional obligation to make it as good as possible.”
Of course, our students are not professional scholars. But many of them are nonetheless capable of producing Wikipedia articles by drawing on the guidance of a scholar-teacher and research librarians, as well as their own experience of having already written a major multi-draft historical paper for my course. And to be honest, there are very few academics who have the time and motivation to write entries on Wikipedia. The work is demanding and frankly the professional incentives are virtually non-existent. Indeed, students who manage to get their articles published on Wikipedia are essentially helping to expand our local historical infrastructure online.
To be sure, the process of getting an article published on Wikipedia is more rigorous and selective than one might think. In the last two semesters, my students have submitted articles for twenty-two new Wikipedia entries, but only half of those have been accepted. Some have been rejected for inadequate research, others for striking a tone that was considered too favorable or unfavorable, and yet others simply for improper formatting. I’m getting better at advising students on how to get their articles published, but in most cases, articles are not rejected or accepted until weeks after the semester is over. If I want to follow the outcome of the process online, I have to make sure that students share their Wikipedia usernames and passwords with me so that I can see.
By publishing Wikipedia entries, students develop several significant writing and research skills. Perhaps most importantly, they learn that they can actually publish a piece of historical writing outside the classroom on the Internet that may be read by hundreds, even thousands, or people. Yes, it does require students to spend several weeks doing extensive primary and second research with guidance from librarians and an instructor and then to spend up to an additional month more writing and rewriting their essays in multiple drafts with the feedback of their peers and teacher. But students who undertake this lengthy and rather involved process experience firsthand that as non-professional writers and researchers, they too can make meaningful historical contributions to a widely read public forum. Students develop experience in writing for a public audience that is far larger than their typical audience of one, namely their instructor.
Writing for Wikipedia requires carefully balancing the kind of historical analysis that one might find in an argument-based essay with a slightly more detached narrative style found in encyclopedias. While it’s not easy, it’s certainly possible to publish an essay on Wikipedia that stakes significant historical claims while also avoiding language and arguments that the site (and many readers) may reject as polemical.
If I can conclude by quoting Rosenzweig again: “Historians have things to learn not only from the open and democratic distribution model of Wikipedia but also from its open and democratic production model…[The] process of creating Wikipedia fosters an appreciation of the very skills that historians try to teach.” If, as I vow to my students, they too can be historians and contribute to their community’s access to the past, then these are exactly the skills I hope they can develop: careful research, polished but accessible academic writing, and the planning and persistence to get things published. That’s why they are as good of candidates as anyone to try to become Wikipedia’s newest authors.
IMAGE CREDIT: Photo by mikesween is licensed under CC0 Public Domain.
First published on November 11th, 2014 with Duke University’s Language, Arts + Media Lab.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joshua Clark Davis is an historian who studies twentieth-century U.S. cultural and social history, with a particular interest in the relationship between capitalism, social movements, and media. He is Assistant Professor at the University of Baltimore in the Division of Legal, Ethical and Historical Studies. He also co-directs Media and the Movement: Journalism, Civil Rights, and Black Power in the American South.
