How Do You Stop Shenanigans at History Websites?

I’m doing some of the readings for next week, and this is a question that keeps popping up. We are supposed to look at Wikipedia to examine how the site operates in regards to its history pages. I’m also reading an article by Jeffrey Schnapp, called “Animating the Archive.” In one section, he says that archives called “Archive You” (well, it’s a concept, really) can be made where users can come in and help tag, categorize, label, and write descriptions for objects added to the online archives to let them be completed sooner. But for both of these sites, how are you supposed to make sure someone does not write something wrong or even offensive. I know I’d be pissed if someone wrote racist things on a page describing an African mask from Zimbabwe in a database just because they can and desire to.

So how do you prevent this? You can have people monitoring pages like Wikipedia does, but even so, things can and invariably do slip through the cracks. You can kick users off who violate the terms, but in a system that involves a database of thousands upon thousands of items, someone can write something that goes undetected for weeks and months if it is large enough.

I guess you can develop software that calls BS on things, but I don’t know how you’d go about developing and implementing that sort of thing. Maybe with keywords that can be added by the owners and administrators of websites that flag an entry immediately for future eyes to examine.

Anyone else have some ideas?Because this is something that has to be addressed as the History Web grows.

Until then…

Shenanigans

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