Something wiki this way comes

After a history faculty bans Wikipedia, John Sutherland asks if the site is just for lazy students, or is really at the forefront of an academic revolution

Last month the history faculty at Middlebury College, a small, high-minded, high-priced institution in woody Vermont, voted to ban undergraduates from citing Wikipedia in their research papers.

The practice had evidently reached epidemic proportions. Students perhaps were wondering why they needed to go all the way to the library when they could get what they needed with a keystroke, without even bothering to unhook their iPods.

The Middlebury ban provoked a predictable culture clash: on the one side the whiskery “old” authoritarian, wielding the censor’s scissors, and on the other, the cyber-libertarians. Think Galileo, think Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Predictably, there has been an explosion of enraged bloggery at Middlebury’s “ban”. One of the surest ways to get famous on the internet is to say something critical about the internet.

But before wading in, one should look at what the history department actually decided. They did not decree that students should not use Wikipedia, but that they should not cite it as authoritative. That is, Wikipedia can serve as a useful resource, but not as an authoritative source. It’s a distinction all budding historians should learn.

Wikipedia is addictively usable. I’ve just used it, for example, to research Wikipedia. It combines new, interactive, information technologies with an extraordinary economy of effort and speed of delivery. It’s run, incredibly, by five people for pennies and offers itself to the logged-in millions for free.

Operations like the Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) cost tens of millions to produce, and cost thousands to buy. And necessarily, the EB lumbers behind (often by years) the event. You can rely on it – but, again, can you be bothered to go to the library?

If you write on a subject you know something about for print you are aware of two things. Firstly, you will know more than the vast majority of your readers. Secondly, there will be people out there — a handful — who know more than you do. Like the skull on the monk’s desk, it keeps you humble.

Wikipedia is founded on this brilliant notion — why not get those experts “out there” to write entries on their areas of expertise? And more importantly, continually update and collate those entries, in collaboration with other experts. “Keep it fluid” is the motto. Knowledge is not inscribed on stone: it grows and evolves. Much faster than old encyclopaedias can bring out new editions.

Project Wikipedia has worked amazingly well. But the downside of any open-door policy is that you can’t keep the ignoramuses, the bigots and the obsessives out. You can correct and contradict them: but you can’t silence them. And their noise can drown out the worthwhile stuff.

I asked Jay Parini, a distinguished professor at Middlebury, what he made of it. He approves of what his colleagues have done because, as he says: “I have myself often been amazed by how good Wikipedia articles can be. But I have also discovered a wide variation in quality, with many errors and oddities of judgment.

“Mainly, there is just no way to tell if anything one reads on Wikipedia is true or false. I found the entry on me full of ridiculous errors; for example, it listed books in my bibliography that I never wrote. Perhaps these were suggestions for future work? I don’t know. But I myself went on to the site to correct the errors. I doubt that, say, Erasmus could do the same.”

This is a subject on which academics are unusually unanimous. Wikipedia is useful — and in some areas, such as just-happening literature and history, uniquely so. But it’s also treacherous, and frequently unbalanced. God invented editors for a reason.

My experience is identical with Professor Parini’s. I recently edited a novel of Robert Louis Stevenson’s — The Black Arrow. It’s historical and regional. The Wikipedia entries for Stevenson are superb. They must, I suspect, have been done by an enthusiastic, omniscient Stevensonian — the kind of amateur scholar who used, in the past, to secrete their knowledge in columns. Why, other than for a love of the subject, anyone would spend such a vast amount of time to prepare these entries, without any expectation of reward or name recognition, I don’t know. But I’m profoundly grateful. And I cite it.

The “John Sutherland” entry on Wikipedia is something else. The main section is more or less accurate. Appended, however, to the end of the article is a link to video site YouTube. This was provoked by a piece I wrote about one of the site’s darlings, “geriatric1929”. The piece was, I believed, mildly sarcastic. YouTubers were not amused. For a day or two, I was YouTube-famous. The contents of their video responses — which at the time, could all be summoned instantaneously from the Wikipedia entry — are bruisingly abusive.

“Fair and Balanced”, as they say on Fox News. Cybersticks and cyberstones say I.

As it happens, I think the Middlebury decision is wrong. They should, I think, have put together an introductory course on “scepticism”, illustrated by Wikipedia entries good and bad, containing advice on how to use, test, and sift the evidence they contain. It would be a handy way to teach the student how to double source, how to believe no proposition as fact until the case is overwhelmingly proven. In that context, bad entries could be as useful as the good. And the means of distinguishing them is all-important.

Very soon the Google Book Search Library Project, indexing the accumulated contents of five of the most capacious libraries in the English-speaking world, will be completed. A couple of years after that, if we believe Bill Gates, Microsoft will launch its Palm Pilot-sized “tablet”, linking the student (for a fee) to every textbook in every subject that they could conceivably need.

These resources will revolutionise higher education. What is important is that, at this preliminary stage, those involved in teaching should work out protocols for using these resources, rather than being used by them as passive, bovine “consumers”. Wikipedia is a good place to start.

It wasn’t very far away from Middlebury — at the Battle of Bennington, where American forces defeated the British 230 years ago – that a shot was fired that rang around the world. The donnish, intramural vote that the dozen or so historians took recently may well have the same effect. Something big, new and very frightening is happening.

n — Dawn/The Guardian News Service