Free Wisdom Online: Creating Facts on Wikipedia

Page Name (for URL)

Page Title

Don't put anything here

Breadcrumb Text

Joe's
[adventures](http://josephhall.org/nqb2/index.php/2006/03/11/wikidisp)
with [Wikipedia](http://wikipedia.com) mediation has gotten me
thinking about Wikipedia editing more and I ended up deciding to get
involved in editing / watching a few articles.  Among other articles,
I spent some time editing a page on
[Taraz](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taraz) - a city in Kazakhstan
where I spent a lot of time in my childhood.  When I came across it,
the article was surprisingly long but highly incoherent, much of it
not even quite in English.  It appears that at some point someone had
[pasted](http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taraz&oldid=30521592)
in a bunch of text sloppily translated from Russian, without bothering
to even put paragraph breaks.  Since then, others have edited the text
and improved it significantly, but it still looked like a mess.  I
didn't have the patience to edit the whole history section, but
decided to try editing a brief three paragraph summary to make it seem
like a coherent story.  A few comments on this.

I am not a historian of Central Asia, so it was all based on tertiary
sources.I followed a the Wikipedia page itself and a few historical
articles in Russian found on the web.  "Verifying" what those said is
of course a matter of finding corroborating sources dealing with
related topics.  E.g., if an article mentions that a Chinese traveler
visiting the city, one can at least verify that such a traveler went
to Central Asia around that time.  In this particular case, much of
the work is simply matching up names:  if the original article mentioned
the city being visited by "Syuan Tszyn",  it takes some familiarity
with both Russian and English transliterations of Chinese names to
figure out that "Syuan Tszyn" really means
[Xuánzàng](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuanzang).  It takes some
searching for other sources to discover that "Dizabul" is really
[Istämi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ist%C3%A4mi).  Compared to that,
mapping "Zemarkha Kililyskyi" onto
[Zemarchus](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zemarchus) is no effort at
all.

What's interesting, however, is how adding those links makes the
article appear so much more credible, in a truly Latourian way.  A
skeptic might suspect that Chinese traveler "Syuan Tszyn" was just
made up by some crazy Wikipedia contributor, but doubting the
existence of [Xuánzàng](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xuanzang) is
somehow harder, as it is "backed up" by an extensive Wikipedia
article.  The reference to Xuánzàng in the article on Taraz of course
adds another ounce of credibility to his existence: if you doubt that
Xuánzàng existed, just look at all the Wikipedia articles linking to
him!  The articles thus corroborate each other in a strange circular
way.  If you doubt that the article on Taraz is well researched,
consider that Xuánzàng, Dizaboul Istämi, Zemarchus and other characters that appear in it -
[Justinian I](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justinian_I), [Menander
Protector](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menander_Protector),
[Al-Muqaddasi](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Muqaddasi), [Chagatai
Khan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagatai_Khan) - are all "real"Xiangyang
historical people, supported by their very own Wikipedia articles.
Every wiki link is thus another "deleted modality", another move towards
making of a "fact".  Some other characters, such as "Zhambyl
Zhabayev", "Chanyu Zhizhi", "Satuk Bugra Khan", or "General
Chernyshev" are yet to gain that status.  Who knows if they ever
existed...  Just give me time, however, and Chanyu Zhizhi will become
just as real as Justinian I!

Page Content

Advanced Fields

HTML Fields

HTTP Fields

Guru Fields

A summary of your changes