Fun with Wikipedia

I’ve looked at 3 Wikipedia articles, well looked behind them, and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. I guess Wikipedia isn’t so shady after all.

1) Chief Joseph: He was the leader of the Nez Perce tribe who fought a brief war in 1877 with U.S. army forces. Most of the discussion rested on whether or not some facts were right or not, but there was a nice discussion on whether it was appropriate to describe his followers as a band or not. The article’s history is short, only one page of revisions stretching to 2004.

2) Since he was a leader of part of the Nez Perce tribe, I figured I would check their history. Not a short or long article. The discussion centered around a few items, most of them how to effectively spell and pronounce the tribe’s name and various names of leaders. There is a worry that Nez Perce is actually a derogatory name for them. The history of this article is much longer, stretching some 500  entries from just 5 weeks ago to 6/1/2005.

3) The Nez Perce had friendly relations with the Lewis and Clarke Expedition of 1803-6, so I jumped to that article.  Very long and intricate article. Even longer discussion, ranging from sexually transmitted diseases the men got from Indian women, crimes the men were convicted of in court marshals, whether or not Lewis was in love with Clarke, unfairness towards American Indians, and complaints about the article needing work, more treatment towards a variety of things, anger towards those who come onto the article to deface it, and discussions on how that can be controlled. There were some passionate debates in this discussion. It was much more animated than the other two articles. The history was extremely long as well, going all the way to early 2004.

I plan on looking at the discussion tabs more often now when I go onto Wikipedia.

Next blog post will have me fleshing out my project ideas a little more.

Advertisement