Almost twenty years ago, two essays were published by two historians I highly respect, each offering a different vision of history’s future online.
The first appeared in June 2006, when Roy Rosenzweig published an early appraisal of Wikipedia in The Journal of American History. Though Wikipedia was only about six years old at the time, it already had one million articles in English, and it was already one of the most visited sites on the web. Moreover, as Rosenzweig noted, “History is probably the category encompassing the largest number of articles.” But what kind of history was it?
Rosenzweig’s judicious review of Wikipedia acknowledged its many weaknesses. Yet he also compared it favorably to some of the best commercial encyclopedias that were then on the market. And for all its faults, Rosenzweig concluded, Wikipedia offered professional historians an intriguing model for how to make history “open-source” and more accessible to an audience beyond the academy. He wanted Wikipedia’s growing readership to benefit from the profession’s expertise.
Two months after Rosenzweig’s article appeared, historian Dan Cohen published a widely circulated post on his own website: Professors, Start Your Blogs. Instead of discussing Wikipedia, Cohen encouraged academics to join what was then known as “the blogosphere.” But his post was no less concerned with the future of the past online, and it was broadly in keeping with the ideas advanced by Rosenzweig, whom he would succeed as director of the Center for History and New Media after Rosenzweig’s untimely death the following year.
Cohen, too, believed it was important for scholars to be online. But the two historians offered slightly different visions when they peered into the future. Cohen wrote: “I would love to see a hundred historians of Victorian science have blogs to which they post quarterly. That would mean an average of one thoughtful post a day on a subject in which I’m greatly interested.” By contrast, Rosenzweig wondered what would happen if more historians got involved with editing Wikipedia:
If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible. And if every member of the Organization of American Historians devoted just one day to improving the entries in her or his areas of expertise, it would not only significantly raise the quality of Wikipedia, it would also enhance popular historical literacy.
To be sure, these two prescriptions—to start a blog, or to edit a wiki—were never mutually exclusive. In the last two decades, academics have done a lot of both. Some scholars have spent time improving Wikipedia on their own or with students in their classes, including colleagues of mine at Rice. Others have answered Rosenzweig’s call to build an open-access, collaboratively edited textbook modeled on Wikipedia.
Still, I think it’s fair to say that most academics who spend time on the web have tended to follow Cohen’s model for being a scholar online: sharing individual expertise and ideas on sites other than Wikipedia.
There are many reasons why. For one thing, the cultural obstacles that Rosenzweig envisioned to open-source, collaborative platforms remain. As he put it in his article’s very first sentence, “History is a deeply individualistic craft.” That’s changing as the discipline’s major professional organizations begin to better acknowledge the many forms scholarship can take. But wariness about Wikipedia and its often anonymous or pseudonymous editors persists. That may be because of scholars’ understandable commitments to attribution and what Cohen called “its associated goods, such as responsibility and credit.” It may also be because some scholars continue to associate Wikipedia with the potential for disinformation and error, a concern pithily summarized by Stephen Colbert in 2006 and famously dramatized by Mills Kelly’s prescient 2008 course on Internet hoaxes.
More than anything, however, both Cohen’s and Rosenzweig’s visions for the future were dramatically redirected by changes that were just over the horizon in 2006: the tsunami of for-profit social media and microblogging sites that swept across the web in the decades that followed. Within two years of Cohen’s call for more blogs, he and many other digital historians moved onto Twitter, despite Mills Kelly’s again prescient warnings about social media. And before long, they were joined by a growing number of historians who did not necessarily identify as “digital” historians, but who found in sites like Twitter or Facebook an easy way to connect with colleagues, participate in public conversations about history, follow conferences from afar, and share their expertise. The Twittersphere grew, and the blogosphere shrunk.
My own history online mirrors these larger trends. Having started a blog as a graduate student in 2004, I was cheered by Cohen’s rousing endorsement of blogging in 2006, though ironically I stopped my blog not long after he called on professors to start. (Life happens!) A few years later, in 2009, I joined Twitter and remained there until 2023, occasionally blogging in various places but tweeting far more often. What I didn’t do, aside from occasional anonymous edits here and there, was work on Wikipedia or even create a personal account on the site.
I don’t regret the time I spent regularly blogging or tweeting. Both proved to be very important for me intellectually and professionally. I remain convinced about the value of practicing scholarship on the web. Indeed, I am still trying to practice open notebook history.
But it’s an understatement to say that, since 2006, the Web has fundamentally changed. Those changes have led many historians to jump ship from the site formerly known as Twitter to new platforms like Mastodon, Substack, Bluesky, or even TikTok. Meanwhile, Wikipedia has gone from being a quirky Web 2.0 startup to a behemoth, with close to seven million articles in English alone.
More recently, of course, forces hostile to scholarly knowledge production have been simultaneously hoovering up sources like Wikipedia into Large Language Models; censoring language on government websites that were once the most reliable on the web; spreading misinformation and stoking violence inside algorithmic social media silos; and threatening the institutions that produce dependable peer-reviewed research. And these forces, it is clear, also have their sights set on gaining control of Wikipedia.
In the face of these myriad transformations, some of the scholars I follow online are going back to the future. Some have gone back to the blog, as Cohen did in 2018. Nostalgia for the halcyon days of the blogosphere and RSS has motivated many others in the so-called “indieweb” movement to come home to the homepage. But more than nostalgia is involved. Hindsight makes it easier to see the costs of entrusting content online to unaccountable corporations and their billionaire owners, as well as the benefits of Posting on one’s Own Site and Syndicating Elsewhere (a.k.a. POSSE). I finally purchased my own domain in 2019 and began collecting little bits of my past blogs and websites here at wcaleb.org. Last year, I also started a new microblog. And I still believe in many of the arguments that Cohen made for blogging in 2006: Professors have knowledge and insights that need to be shared, and they are often best shared on one’s own domain.
I’m less sanguine than I once was about the wider social impact of blogging, however. For one thing, if a blog post drops in a dark forest, does anybody hear it? The answer, I’m afraid, is increasingly No. Today, “A.I.” slop is threatening to overwhelm the open web, and search engines are abandoning their original missions of scraping and searching human-generated content. When Cohen first called on professors to start their blogs, one could reasonably assume that such posts would be found with the right combination of keywords. That’s not a guarantee any longer; on the contrary, algorithmic sites have the power to downgrade the visibility of posts on the open web.
This is not necessarily a bad thing for certain kinds of blogging. Arguably, it makes it easier to cultivate digital gardens visited by smaller communities. Still, because I do still believe in making scholarship widely accessible, I’m also increasingly thinking about going back to the future that Rosenzweig envisioned in 2006, one in which scholars might more frequently do what they can to improve Wikipedia.
That’s why earlier this year, I took the step of creating a user account on Wikipedia, so that my revisions would be attributed to me. And I also decided, during Black History Month, to spend a little bit of every day editing a related Wikipedia entry. I didn’t succeed in making it an every day streak. (Life still happens!) But by the end of the month, I had made edits to twenty-two different history articles on Wikipedia, on subjects ranging from Frederick Douglass and Claudette Colvin to James Reese Europe, from jazz drummer Billy Hart to architect Norma Merrick Sklarek. According to an impact report that Wikipedia provides to registered users, the pages that I spent maybe a couple of hours improving have been viewed more than 700,000 times over the last 60 days. And since then, I’ve spent some time improving other articles when I have a chance, which I guess makes me one of the site’s current active registered users.
I doubt very much that any of this makes me a full-fledged Wikipedian, but I would not refuse the label. Instead, I’m here to recommend that other scholars try it too.
Let me be clear that I have no illusions about the relative importance of editing Wikipedia within the larger crisis that scholars in all disciplines currently face. Geez, even to write that sentence makes me aware of how quixotic any effort to “improve history on the web” seems these days. I’m most concerned in this moment about shoring up and protecting the institutions that produce the longest lasting forms of peer-reviewed scholarship, and when and where I can personally advance that goal, that’s where I’ll be devoting most of my time and energies on the job.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed my month on Wikipedia enough to want to spend some more of my idle moments on the site. And that’s more than I can say about some of the other popular websites that vie for my attention. For certain, Wikipedia is imperfect, made of crooked timber like any human thing. And many of the criticisms Rosenzweig named in 2006 (the demographic skewing among Wikipedia editors, the less than mellifluous writing, the skepticism of expertise, the false equivalence that sometimes masquerades as political neutrality) still apply to the site to one degree or another. Parts of Wikipedia are still plagued with toxicity and flame wars.
But other early criticisms of the site seem less relevant now that we know just how bad things can get online. What once seemed like a red flag for misinformation and hoaxes (the ability of any human reader to edit Wikipedia) is now the flag that encourages me to get in the water. Not as a substitute for the work of continuing scholarly peer review, or of building trust in scholarly publishing. But perhaps as a substitute (at least some of the time) for the doom-scrolling I might have done on other sites that I have little power to change. Wikipedia is, despite its shortcomings, still a place where a factual error, when spotted, can easily be corrected, which is more than you can say for the black boxes of “A.I.” or the many social media sites where fact-checking has been reduced to upvoting “community notes.” If writing history online right now sometimes feels like tilting at windmills made of chainsaws, let me at least ride with the people who still believe there are such things as reliable sources and scholarship.
Notice my parenthetical comment above: at least some of the time. I have no faith that Wikipedia will last forever in its current form, and given the current emergencies facing the academy and the humanities, I’m far past the utopian idea that simply putting scholarship on the open web will magically transform the world. To the extent that this post is prescriptive at all, what it recommends is less “professors, spend more time on the web” than “with the time you spend on the web, consider helping Wikipedia out now and then.”
After all, Wikipedia is much bigger today than it was when Rosenzweig reviewed it. Arguably, it is much better, too. It still stands at the top of search engine results, holding its own against for-profit Web 2.0 sites that have succumbed to the usual fate of such sites. More than just “the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century,” as Rosenzweig called it, it is now one of the most visited websites in the world.
Indeed, Wikipedia’s reach is arguably even greater than the number of direct visits suggests, because its content is increasingly absorbed and embedded in even more popular sites. It seems likely that in the coming days, its significance will only grow even as its content becomes more contested, especially as online sources considered to be reliable by Wikipedians undergo dramatic revision. So while I am very late (as always) in following Roy Rosenzweig’s lead, it seems to me there is no better time for scholars to start editing—and to be bold.
Image Credit: Rice campus, cornerstone, Administration Bldg. (Lovett Hall), from the Woodson Research Center. The Greek inscription, roughly translated, reads: “‘Rather,’ said Democritus, ‘would I discover the cause of one fact than become king of the Persians.’”