Keith Old wrote: > Folks, > The New York Times reports: > > http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/the-wikipedia-battle-over-joe-wilsons-obama-heckling/ > > > If journalism is the first draft of history, what is a Wikipedia entry when > it is updated within minutes of an event to reflect changes in a person’s > biography? > > The zeroth draft of bad history ... usually heavily influenced by partisans, with the instantly available sources rather than reliable ones. Situation normal, all fouled up. We do have an interesting and novel position for WP vis-a-vis historiography, namely that WP coverage is a movie where journalism is more like a series of stills.
If you look at historiography of something like the English Civil War, you can see quite a number of parallels, such as stridency, emphasis on personalities, pamphleteering/blogging as a source of opinions, and so on. The whole business of the Internet taking us back to the 17th century and a reactive, emotional style of politics seems to me very suggestive. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l