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This is the source of Rex’s frustration: Poochiemoo clearly misunderstands how wiki entries work. No entry should ever be ‘taken down’ until a ‘correct one’ can be put up. In the case of the Steward entry this request is even more peculiar – new biographical research has been done, perhaps superceeding what we used to think, but that doesnt make the old research worthy of erasure. It is quite clear how any edits should be made in such a case – you cite the different opinions, the conflicting evidence etc. You say “…but recent evidence presented by Kerns suggests Steward’s PhD was not wholly his own work”. Many of PM’s bullet points cited above would more usefully have been contributed to WP as small (temporary?) edits of Rex’s original entry, waiting for further edits later on…that’s how it works!
Note that this is also similar to how mainstream published encyclopedias, text books, and dictionaries work – new editions are published every year, entries are tweaked according to current perspectives. But interestingly most contributors to these forms of publication get much less recognition that their counterparts do at wikipedia – I can put in a few commas, and have my name recorded in the history of that entry forever, no mater whether they survive on the front page or not. Compare that to the person who did some proof reading for encyclopedia britannica in 2002…

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your work doesn’t disappear into oblivion when someone else changes it, as far as I know. It can be reverted.

I know that there’s some standards for how edits get made and utilized, but the question for me is one of value — how is the relative value of different contributions determined? Working this out is, I think, the greatest challenge Wikipedia has set for itself in the coming years, because the whole idea is that value does not inhere in peer review, professional editing, or even credentials. At the moment, WP is left with a kind of “vulgar Foucauldian” salesmanship — who, in the absence of formal qualifications, can make a better-received claim for him/herself?

In PM’s case, there’s a harder issue — his research is spot in the middle of a drastic reassessment of a major figure in the field of anthropology. Many of the edits he might contribute are going to be contradicted by several other sources, as well as the vast body of Steward-loving anthropologists with an investment in maintaining the reputation of their teacher, mentor, intellectual progenitor, or whatever. In this sense, WP faces the same limitation as Ency. Brittanica or any other “fixed” reference — the need for authoritativeness may well overpower current developments in the field.

For academic journals maybe there is peer review – but wikipedia is not an academic journal. So, I just don’t see what point is trying to be made (about wikipedia specifically).

As I understand it, WP’s openness is supposed to stand in for traditional peer review. If the aim is to challenge the primacy of Ency. Brit. (and if it’s not then I don’t know why anyone would bother) then WP’s openness has to be structured in a way that it’s not a “poor cousin” to peer review but an improvement on it. And if WP doesn’t aim to at least as high of standards as academic publications (not just reviews, but most University Press publications are also peer reviewed) then why should academics involve themselves in the project?

Ironically, I’m a big fan of WP, despite my reservations. I am astounded by the sheer immensity of the task they have already achieved. If I am being harsh on it here, it is because I do not want to see it swamped by complaints about its credibility, its lack of authority, or its potential for infighting.

It seems most logical that perhaps PM doesn’t have time to change the article as it is, and when he does he can improve it (if he wants). Until that time, he can post that list of errors in the talk page and other people can work on it, or it can just sit there. People realize its wikipedia I think, not The Truth About Everything… if they were researching and wanted precise and accurate information they would go to the Kern book, for example.

Well, the issue is that PM has done exactly what you say, and Rex (and I’m with him here) is interested in why someone with the expertise to make corrections is hesitant to actually go ahead and make those corrections. It presents an interesting anthropological problem that needs answers if WP is going to move forward. But the second part of this, about WP not being The Truth About Everything — I understand that, and I agree, but this raises the question of what exactly WP is aiming to be. Is the goal of being the perpetual red-headed stepchild to Enc. Brit.’s towheaded first son really all that desirable?

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Also, and I would like some information about this if anyone is able to share, what is the issue of copyright regarding material that I submit to Wikipedia vs. my dissertation or my published articles?

And asking if this was the answer to the question:

Contributors’ rights and obligations

If you contribute material to Wikipedia, you thereby license it to the public under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts). In order to contribute, you therefore must be in a position to grant this license, which means that either
you own the copyright to the material, for instance because you produced it yourself, or
you acquired the material from a source that allows the licensing under GFDL, for instance because the material is in the public domain or is itself published under GFDL.
In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you can never retract the GFDL license for the versions you placed here: that material will remain under GFDL forever. In the second case, if you incorporate external GFDL materials, as a requirement of the GFDL, you need to acknowledge the authorship and provide a link back to the network location of the original copy. If the original copy required invariant sections, you have to incorporate those into the Wikipedia article; it is however very desirable to replace GFDL texts with invariant sections by original content without invariant sections whenever possible.

As far as the rest, well your work doesn’t disappear into oblivion when someone else changes it, as far as I know. It can be reverted. PM and yourself seem to be implying that you could spend hundreds of hours working on an article and then someone could just replace it with “U sux~!!” But, and maybe I am mistaken, I don’t think this is the case.

As far as PM wanting to remove the article because it doesn’t hold up to the facts, well I don’t see how that is necessarily a wikipedia issue. Hypothetically, Rex could have published that in some book, put it on his website, or whatever else. PM couldn’t simply have it scorched from the face of the earth because its full of disinformation and PM’s impeding dissertation will show all that. For academic journals maybe there is peer review – but wikipedia is not an academic journal. So, I just don’t see what point is trying to be made (about wikipedia specifically). It seems most logical that perhaps PM doesn’t have time to change the article as it is, and when he does he can improve it (if he wants). Until that time, he can post that list of errors in the talk page and other people can work on it, or it can just sit there. People realize its wikipedia I think, not The Truth About Everything… if they were researching and wanted precise and accurate information they would go to the Kern book, for example.

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Were your copyright questions not addressed there?

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If you’re who I think you are, we know each other. The backchannel I was referring to is not here, but at Wikipedia — according to Rex’ orginal post, you made comments at WIkipedia instead of simply adding in the edits, and the question is, if you understand the process there, why you wouldn’t just edit the entry. And you’ve given about the answer I would have given — how mcuh incentive is there to draw on our own expertise when other people might erase whatever changes we make for a whole litany of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of our work?

Underliyng this is the relationship between intellectual labor and the “property” that it produces. I don’t nexessarily need to profit financially from my intellectual labor — I don’t make a penny for my work at Savage Minds, for instance — but that does not mean that I consider my labor without value. I’m not opposed to giving my labor as a gift to the Wikipedia project and the world at large — in fact, I wholeheartedly endorse the aims and philosophy of Wikipedia — but do not relish the thought of seeing my gift rejected. I’m reminded, speaking of gifts, of Mauss (of course), who notes that there is an obligation to give gifts, but there is also an obligation to receive them. In the Wikipedia community, though, there is no obligation to accept the gift. What, then, of the value of the labor I, or you, or anyone, put into the piece offered?

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The entry that I asked to be flagged and taken down on Wikipedia had at least a dozen factual errors, and I quickly ran through some of them in the post above to appease Kerim. These errors mean, I think, that the whole entry has to be re-done. As I said I am willing to write one and enter it, but I am not finished it yet — because the entry will be based on my dissertation, and I am just completing the biography section. The information on Steward is really scary in terms of the history of the discipline, and I want to offer a reinterpretation of his oeuvre based on Kerns’ work and his relationship to colonialism, government policy, and anthropological theory. I could write 95% of the entry now, but it seems improper to submit an incomplete one. This does not mean that I am lazy, rather it has something to do with being exactly the opposite – busy.

I guess another reason to be hesitant to offer an entry (and this seems like a bigger issue now that I have read these discussions here) is that someone can come along and change an entry, say one that I worked on for 4 years, and acknowledge with glee that they haven’t read the requisite material on the subject – in this case the biography of Steward by Kerns or the Clemmer et al (1999), Julian Steward and the Great Basin — claiming some sort of authority on the matter because they have had a hand in 107 other entries. I find that to be specious reasoning. It makes me wonder about the value of Wikipedia. That being said, this site, as an anthropology discussion site is interesting and I am more willing to share my thoughts here because my comments can be addressed but not edited, and I think I have a chance to get a better shake here than at wikipedia.

Also, and I would like some information about this if anyone is able to share, what is the issue of copyright regarding material that I submit to Wikipedia vs. my dissertation or my published articles?

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The question Rex raised is why someone with this level of expertise (and you know I respect your work) would stick with backchannel comments instead of making the edits directly. This is not necessarily a question about Steward or you or Rex, but why *anyone* would be hesitant to add their expertise to the “collective brain” of Wikipedia. I happen to think there’s good reasons some people don’t, but it would be instructive to learn why *you* don’t.

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“Steward was born in Washington, D.C. His father was the chief of the Board of Examiners of the U.S. Patent Office while his uncle was the chief forecaster for the U.S. Weather Bureau. While his father was a staunch atheist,”

• Thomas Steward, Julian’s father, was a “Republican Baptist.” (Kerns 2003: 27)

“his mother became a devout Christian Scientist. Steward showed no particular interest in anthropology as a child, but at the age of sixteen he enrolled at Deep Springs College,”

• This statement has no causal connection.

“a remote prep school high in the south-eastern Sierra Nevada designed to produce future political leaders. His experience of the high mountains and local Shoshone and Paiute peoples awakened an interest in life in this area.”

• There is no evidence to support that he anything to do with any Paiute people during this time, except for one ranch hand.

“After spending a year at Berkeley, Steward transferred to Cornell University. Cornell lacked an anthropology department, and he studied zoology and biology while the college’s president, Livingston Farrand, continued to nurture his interest in anthropology. Steward earned his B.A. in 1925 and returned to Berkeley to pursue a Ph.D. in anthropology.

Berkeley in the 1920s was a center of anthropological thought.”

• 2 paragraphs below you sate Columbia “was the center of anthropology in the United States.”

“The discipline originated in the work of Franz Boas at Columbia University, and two of Boas’s greatest students, Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie established the department at Berkeley. Along with Edward Gifford, they established Berkeley as a west-coast beachhead for the discipline. Steward proved to be a star student, and quickly earned a reputation as a scholar of great potential. He graduated in 1929 after completing a library thesis entitled The Ceremonial Buffoon of the American Indian, a Study of Ritualized Clowning and Role Reversals”

• Steward actually claimed that his dissertation was the first study in culture and personality. It is theoretically anonymous for him, and Kerns goes to great lengths to show that it bears more than a close resemblance to his first wife’s work – demonstrating two important things: one he was married to two women while in Utah, simultaneously; and his dissertation is questionably his. In fact Kroeber was unhappy with the thesis until Nyswander, a behavioural psychologist and Steward’s first wife, got her hands on it.

“and went to teach at the University of Michigan, establishing an anthropology department”

• he was already at Michigan for one year before he completed his Phd. And taught there for one year after. He did not establish the Department at Michigan (Kerns 2003: I am stopping the specific citations now, but I can provide them all).

“there that would later become famous under the guidance of fellow evolutionist Leslie White. In 1930 he moved to the University of Utah, which was closer to the Sierras, and conducted extensive fieldwork in California, Nevada, Idaho, and Oregon.”

• He got the job at Utah because he wife was an associate prof there, and she was friends with the president of the university. His “extensive” fieldwork has been shown to be most questionable.

“In 1935 Steward began a long involvement with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”

• Steward went to work at the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) and for the first year he acted as a liaison between the BAE and the BIA, where he wrote one report (Cf. Rusco 1999, Kerns 2003, Blackhawk, 1999, Pinkoski and Asch 2004) that was rejected by the Commisioner of Indian Affairs, John Collier, because Steward refused to agree to the premises of the Reorganization Act.

“He was key in the reform of the organization known as the ‘New Deal for the American Indian,’ a restructuring which involved Steward in a variety of policy and financial issues.”

• He opposed the New Deal vehemently. The issues surrounding this statement are incredible.

“For the next eleven years Steward became an administrator of considerable clout, editing the Handbook of South American Indians. He also took a position at the Smithsonian Institute, where he founded the Institute for Social Anthropology in 1943. He also served on a committee to reorganize the American Anthropological Association and played a role in the creation of the National Science Foundation. He was also active in archaeological pursuits, successfully lobbying Congress to create the Committee for the Recovery of Archaeological Remains (the beginning of what is known today as ‘salvage archaeology’) and worked with Wendell Bennett to establish the Viru Valley project, an ambitious research program centered in Peru.

Steward’s career reached its apogee in 1946 when he took up the chair of the anthropology department at Columbia University — the center of anthropology in the United States.”

• He was never chair at Columbia. He was hired privately by the Departmental Chair, Wm. Duncan Strong, to replace Ralph Linton.

“At this time, Columbia saw an influx of WWII veterans who were attending school thanks to the GI Bill. Steward quickly developed a coterie of students who would go on to have enormous influence in the history of anthropology, including Sidney Mintz, Eric Wolf, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, Morton Fried, Robert F. Murphy, and influenced other scholars such as Marvin Harris. Many of these students participated in the Puerto Rico Project, yet another large-scale group research study that focused on modernization in Puerto Rico.

Steward left Columbia for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he continued to teach until his retirement in 1968.”

• He had a research position at Illinois, he did not teach during this time and he had no administration duties. He did bring Wolf, Manners, Service and others with him from NY; and, at this time he worked mostly for the Department of Justice in the Indian Claims Commission proceedings where he offered the ethnographic descriptions for terra nullius arguments.

“There he undertook yet another large-scale study, a comparative analysis of modernization in eleven third world societies. The results of this research were published in three volumes entitled Contemporary Change in Traditional Societies. Steward died in 1972.”

I think there are some very serious errors with this entry.

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