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Wikipedia Entry Turned Into Actual Encyclopedia
Ponca City, We love you writes "If journalism is the first rough draft of history, what does that make Wikipedia? Time Magazine reports that technology writer James Bridle has created a 12-volume compendium of every edit made to the Wikipedia entry for the Iraq War between December 2004 and November 2009. 'It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes "Saddam Hussein was a dickhead.,"' writes Bridle. 'This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.' The books presumably only exist in one copy, so they are not for sale."
Time Magazine reports ...
It was BookTwo that originated this story because that's written by the guy who put the book together (which was picked up by a blog which was picked up by The Awl which was picked up by Time's NewsFeed). Of course, we are talking about Time here. I found the images of what's actually inside very interesting but I would bet that the guy who used some simple code to create the Creative Commons work is probably the only person to tender cash for a physical copy.
Here's another complete rewrite reducing the whole article to:
But you know what's really interesting? When Bridle compiled this used their lexer to transform the XML, he kept the IP address in the upper right of each edit. So the above edit's IP address is forever in print: 68.162.123.240 Of course if you had used a username to make an edit, that was put in place of the IP address.
This whole thing reminds me of the time lapse video done of the Virginia Tech shootings. Creative stuff you can do with Wikipedia.
My work here is dung.
Never let facts get in the way of a poorly constructed opinion.
Of course, it's hard to tell what the facts are when your opinion is constructed of information told by people who refuse to divulge the facts...or something.
Living With a Nerd
[...] and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes "Saddam Hussein was a dickhead.
I searched the page, and I cannot find the entry that Saddam Hussein was a dickhead. Should I assume he was not?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
now, with the internet, we get to see all of the opinions forming: the opinions that won out, the opinions that lost out, and of course, the trolls
internet: what is history without trolls?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Wow, you missed something in college. Historiography is essentially "checking your sources" and looking at how history was written. It's not some off-the-wall media term or something. Every historian does (or should do) it.
Even at this late stage, there are
1) People who still claim there were WMDs.
2) People who say there were WMD's but don't actually believe it anymore.
3) People who say we genuinely thought there WMD's and there was never any reason not to think so.
4) People who say we genuinely thought there WMD's but we were misled by bad intelligence.
5) People who say we genuinely thought there might be WMD's, but if we were wrong, we didn't really care.
6) People who say we never actually thought there were WMD's, but they made a good excuse to invade.
7) People who now say there were no WMD's, but pretend that they knew this all along.
8) People who claim that there never were WMD's, but no one would listen to them.
At any one time, any one of these subsects could be winning the ongoing flame war.
I can't help but think this exercise might have been more meaningful, had it been conducted over a page with less competing factions.
I think you may need to spend more time reading history books. Historians are not content to assume that every document from a verifiable is the "truth".
If you scan through any history textbook, you will always find a debate on the accuracy of all of their sources, as well as discussions on the motivations of the author, and the weaknesses in their account.
Only very poor historians ever assume a documented "fact" is the absolute truth.
Saddam wasn't a dickhead?
rewriting history since 2109
Okay, this is all good and all that. But, I think the real question in here is: *WHO* is the real owner of the Brooklyn bridge? Who should I call to make a bid for it? I mean, I'm so tired of giving money to the wrong people for it... sigh...
This wins the award for the day for being the post where the title disagrees most with the article content. Yay!
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Historians are not content to assume that every document from a verifiable is the "truth".
However the people who read history books, by and large, tend to assume that what they read is true. Or, at least, based on facts. It's an interesting mental trap: I know fact X about history because I read it in a respectable history book. But was that fact based on a highly reliable source, multiple reliable sources, hearsay, speculation? As the end-reader it's hard to know. It's even somewhat difficult for the historian to really verify something, if that's what he's trying to do. If enough people after the fact begin asserting a certain narrative about what happened or what it meant then this can "drown out" contrary accounts, especially if it is not due to a centrally directed conspiracy.
What the historian eventually writes down as his best estimate of the truth is going to be presumed to be correct by his readership, absent someone discovering something that makes it obviously untrue. Even in such a case many will continue to cling to the correctness of the account they read first, denying evidence that now proves it incorrect. This happens all the time.
I want my Cowboyneal
That's a big book at 12 volumes, but it's not an encyclopedia. An encyclopedia is "training in a circle", the "full circle" of knowledge of the world. "Iraq War Jr" is not a full circle; even "everything about its Wikipedia entry" is merely a small point of knowledge in a full education.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. Indeed, it's more like a cylinder, since its circle is stacked atop the previous circle of revisions. It's an encylindropedia.
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make install -not war