Sooner or later, as a modern-day student you have to figure out where you stand on Wikipedia. \u00a0It’s either something you depend on, something you avoid, or something you use but try not to acknowledge. \u00a0Where do you stand? \u00a0More important if you are a first-year undergraduate, where will you stand once it comes to paper-writing time?<\/p>\n
The answers don’t come easy anymore. \u00a0For years, humanities professors warned students away from Wikipedia. \u00a0But now some are welcoming it. \u00a0William Cronon, a distinguished historian, used his term as president of the American Historical Association (AHA) (a position once held by Henry Adams himself) to advocate for making Wikipedia better. \u00a0Check out Cronon’s\u00a02012 editorial on the subject<\/a>. \u00a0He\u00a0makes some powerful points, but historian Timothy Messer-Kruse’s dismal experience <\/a>with trying to improve a mediocre Wikipedia entry highlights some of the inherent problems with this crowd-sourced and surprisingly rigid online encyclopedia. \u00a0More recently, historian Stephen Campbell reports to the AHA about his challenges <\/a>in trying to live up to Cronon’s call to action.<\/p>\n One way for our seminar to weigh Cronon’s enthusiasm against Messer-Kruse’s complaints would be to explore how Wikipedia handles Henry Adams<\/a>, his various major works (especially\u00a0The Education<\/a>),\u00a0<\/em>and other subjects relevant to his life and times (such as the Adams Memorial<\/a>, Charles Francis Adams, Sr.<\/a>, \u00a0and the American Civil War<\/a>). Here is also where the Wikipedia entry writing assignment<\/a> comes into play. \u00a0In this case, we will be testing whether we can make Wikipedia a better place for readers to discover more about the people who affected Henry Adams’s education. \u00a0By crafting engaging profiles on our course website about figures such as Louisa Catherine Adams, Charles Sumner or William Henry Seward, we will hopefully create a platform that will feed better, richer (and more Henry Adams-centric) information into the world’s largest encyclopedia.<\/p>\n By doing so, perhaps we will prove that the Isle of Wikipedia is not just a place where lazy students get stranded, but rather that it can be fertile ground for serious students who to make real contributions. \u00a0Or not. \u00a0We’ll soon see…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sooner or later, as a modern-day student you have to figure out where you stand on Wikipedia. \u00a0It’s either something you depend on, something you avoid, or something you use but try not to acknowledge. \u00a0Where do you stand? \u00a0More important if you are a first-year undergraduate, where will you stand once it comes to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":373,"featured_media":0,"parent":21,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-86","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/373"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/86\/revisions"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/21"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}