Wikipedia, I feel, gets a bad rap sometimes especially in the classrooms I was in growing up. Because it can be accessed and edited by pretty much anyone, there’s sort of a reputation that Wikipedia isn’t very reputable or safe to use in terms of gathering information, or at least factual, unbiased information. In recent years, or maybe it’s just the experience I’ve had in my college classes, I think that people are starting to come around to Wikipedia being in an academic space. When starting research projects in my history classes, I’m encouraged to use Wikipedia not just as a starting place to get some general background information but also as a tool to find other (more scholarly) sources that pertain to my topic. My middle school teachers would be fuming to hear me udder such words! But honestly, I’m not a hater of Wikipedia. It’s a great place to go for just some basic information, also they have some very useful charts that I look at to spoil reality competition shows for myself. Speaking of which, let’s take a look at the reality tv page of Wikipedia!
What is the Convo Happening on Wikipedia’s Reality TV Page?
Ok I can’t lie, I picked this page before looking back on the assignment for this week and seeing we needed to pick a history page, but I’d argue that reality tv itself has history and could be an example of the history of Americans’ taste in entertainment and development of technology, so in my opinion it counts. I had no idea that Wikipedia pages had “Talk” pages until I watched the TedTalk assigned for this week with Jimmy Wales titled “The birth of Wikipedia.” This sections of the articles have the history of the conversation happening between users about the page, and I’ve got to say I was surprised to see people discussing so critically an article about reality tv (Reality TV Wikipedia Talk Page)
At the top of the list there’s sections about how the page was used in student projects but then if you keep scrolling there’s posts about bias in the criticisms section, a proposal to split a section off into its own article because it was too long and, therefore, made the page more difficult to navigate, all conversations that I’ve had taking this class or any other group projects in college. While I still wouldn’t go as far as cite Wikipedia as a source on any of my work, it’s nice to know that this is discourse and thought behind the information that’s being put on the platform.
What is Copyright and How Can We Use it?
Copyright, from my understanding, is insurance that whatever piece of original material that one publishes they still own creative license to and can restrict to a certain extent its uses by other parties. The protection of fair use does allow the public to use the original material in a way that provides commentary or criticism, but not distort or copy the material itself. I think this is a crucial component because, again, it promotes discourse and allows us to be critical consumers of the content we’re seeing online.
I’ve never myself had to get a copyright on anything, but for this project that we’re working on with the Heritage Center, I could see us using CC BY-SA (which you can read more on the Creative Commons website) which allows people to use the images that we’ll put online as long as attribution is still given to the creator, the Heritage Center. I believe the Heritage Center already does copyright their material, so they could be using a different license. Either way, this process is an important lesson in digital material creation, and I’m looking forward to seeing where this goes in our project!
