Crowdsourced Knowledge: How to Read a Wikipedia Article

Growing up in the early 2000s, I was taught that Wikipedia was not a credible source to be used independently in my papers. I had to use scholarly articles, papers, books, etc. Now in 2018, Wikipedia probably still has that stigma but I think that it is becoming more accepted if at least a reference while conducting scholarly research.

When a person living in the past 17 years, wants to find out more information about a topic, say Digital Humanities they Google it. One of the top five results will be a Wikipedia article. A person in 2018 might ask how did Google but most importantly in this case, Wikipedia become so popular? How could an open-source software gain so much traction and be one of the leading online encyclopedias in the world?

This week’s articles gave me more insight into those questions. I read an article from GMU’s RRCHNM publication of how historical scholarship is impacted by Wikipedia. Whether or not it has a place to be used, criticized, and praised among historians and its readers. From reading the other articles/watching a video, I learned about how Wikipedia has a dark side in terms of how they manage their people and content. I also learned how pages are edited, how to see who contributed to the pages, and what the controversies within that page were.

With all of this newfound knowledge, I proceeded with the Wikipedia activity about analyzing the Digital Humanities Wiki page. There I learned to go to the “View history” tab in the upper right-hand corner of the page to view the contributions made by people along with the timestamp and what the article looked like after their edits. Then on the upper left-hand side of the page I clicked on the “Talk” tab, where I learned what the community said about various controversial topics about the Wiki article. With this knowledge I was able to see some of the profiles of the contributors and this helped me better understand the background that they came in with when editing. Overall I think the user experience of navigating it as a contributor is a bit tricky unless you have already done it before. As a person who only reads the articles and doesn’t edit it, I found it difficult to navigate through the contributor-information side of things.

I think that Wikipedia is a good source to get a general idea of a topic, its purpose in allowing users to edit content is revolutionary and the amount of data that is collected could be a good source for a digital history project. How it is used in the future is another topic that I can’t wait to see how in the years to come.