Cathy Davidson on Wikipedia

As a follow-up to last night's discussion of Wikipedia you might want to take a look at Cathy Davidson's short and positive piece about Wikipedia published recently in The Chronicle of Higher Education. It's called "We Can't Ignore the Influence of Digital Technologies" (Volume 53, Issue 29, Page B20). She compares the accuracy level of Wikipedia favorably to other encyclopedias (and even scholarly books and articles), and points out that unlike print media, Wikipedia articles can be very quickly corrected. But beyond this, she insists we not think of Wikipedia as an "encyclopedia" at all: "Wikipedia is not just an encyclopedia. It is a knowledge community, uniting anonymous readers all over the world who edit and correct grammar, style, interpretations, and facts. It is a community devoted to a common good — the life of the intellect. Isn't that what we educators want to model for our students?" She goes on to insist that rather than ban Wikipedia from college campuses (as was recently done at Middlebury College) we ought to "make studying what it does and does not do part of the research-and-methods portion of our courses." She argues that "instead of resorting to the 'Delete' button for new forms of collaborative knowledge made possible by the Internet" we ought to "make the practice of research in the digital age the object of study." Provocative stuff from an important American Studies critic at Duke University.