Are Wikipedians good historians?
• Articles on synthetic topics (U.S. immigration history) are often incomplete and unevenly written. • Certain topics are missing, reflecting lack of interest of Wikipedians. • Biographies are more favorable terrain. • Rosenzweig compared 25 biographies with those in Encarta (Microsoft) and American National Biography Online (Oxford), both of which have mulitmillion dollar budgets. • Widipedia lags behind ANBO but exceeds Encarta in coverage. W has found unpaid volunteers “to write suprisingly detailed and reliable portraits of relatively obscure historical figures.” • Article lengths vary (3500 word on Isaac Asimov, 3200 on Woodrow Wilson). W’s authors are not uniformly distributed demographically–English-speaking males and Internet denizens.
