Andy: Graham's Wikiblitz and the Question of Historical Authority

Graham, “The Wikiblitz: A Wikipedia Editing Assignment in a First-Year Undergraduate Class”

Discussion response by Andy King

Prof. Whaley’s question: While Wikipedia is at times seen as a poor source for students, especially in high school and college teaching, Graham argues that there are ways to engage students by using this source. What pedagogical benefits and reactions were the result of Graham’s pedagogical assignment? 

Graham conducted an experiment while teaching a first-year class on digital history at Carleton University in 2010. The experiment, Graham says, “was designed to explore how knowledge is created and represented on Wikipedia, by working to improve a single article” (75). Graham describes the contemporary situation of history writing on the internet as constituted by a “feedback loop” between, e.g., a search engine like Google, which will pick up on edited sources like Wikipedia pages and present them to search users at or near the top of a results list, and those who write and edit such pages.

Graham writes of encountering a fair amount of resistance from “one significant element in the class, my declared history majors” (77). With the prevalence of digital gaming in mind, Graham discussed with the students the idea that Wikipedia can be seen as “a kind of game where competing visions of common knowledge vie for dominance” (77).  Via the “Wikiblitz” assignment, Graham hoped for students to experience themselves the process of editing a Wikipedia article at the same time that others were instructed to as well, and to understand how “knowledge creation on Wikipedia is as much about style as it is about substance,” that “writing for Wikipedia constitutes a kind of peer review,” that the “NPOV [neutral point of view] provisions could lead to particular kinds of rhetoric and judgments regarding knowledge credibility and suitability…” (78).

Although Graham noted that not all declared history students appeared convinced by the experiment that Wikipedia--or, more accurately, the process by which articles were written and revised on Wikipedia--had anything valuable to teach them as historians, the experiment nonetheless forced students to reckon with both (a) the public nature of digital history-writing and (b) the interactive, give-and-take, temporal process by which multiple voices collaborate to produce texts that are then consumed as bits of historical knowledge. Students also gained a practical understanding of some of the ways in which an online community of writers and thinkers like Wikipedia self-regulates and guards against bad-faith actors: for such students, the idea that anyone could simply write whatever they wanted on Wikipedia and have that be accepted was shown to be false. (Indeed, as Graham mentions, one student experienced the frustrating reverse of this scenario: their good-faith contribution was rejected as vandalism by a bot.)

A couple of questions for discussion:

• Although Graham seems to have designed the experiment to get students to think, in part, about the ways in which their voices, perspectives, and contributions are parts of a broader conversation out of which “history” is written, the Wikipedia convention of writing with a “NPOV [neutral point of view]” didn’t seem to come up for too much discussion or interrogation. (Adherence to the NPOV requirement was even one of Graham’s criteria for evaluating student submissions to the assignment.)
• At the close of the essay, Graham implies that even the most resistant students became aware, for however brief a time, that knowledge is “socially constructed.” This is a common axiom in cultural studies and related fields, and seems to capture an important part of the way in which the texts found on Wikipedia come into being by collaboration, compromise, dispute, and revision--or the way in which such texts can be distorted by social facts about contributors, such as their preferences, backgrounds, and ideologies. But I also want to press on this axiom a bit. How does a notion of knowledge as “socially constructed” allow us to account for a concept of “historical truth”? Is there nothing more to the writing of history than different socially-determined voices competing for attention? Or are there ways in which those voices might, perhaps imperfectly, strive to produce an account of some historical event that is defensible on the ground that it is “true,” however imperfectly so?