Crowd Sourcing vs. Expertise

For so long as opinions are counted, not weighed, the better part had often to be overcome by the greater.
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2

A student paper that I was grading about 2007 put me onto a source that was new to me. The student was making a claim that I had seen in dozens of college papers over the previous two decades, and that was discussed and dismissed in several books on my shelf. The student sourced the claim. I went to the source and found it there. I found other errors in the source.

Within the hour, or perhaps five minutes later, or maybe the next day, I discovered that I could correct the error. The "source" was the Wikipedia entry on the Nez Perce. It repeated a common myth that Chief Joseph was a military genius who led Nez Perce warriors in battle. Lucullus V. McWhorter (1860-1944) addressed this myth in two books that were the culmination of decades of interviews with survivors of the Nez Perce War of 1877, but it was still being pushed in documentaries about the war in the 1970s. Wikipedia also asserted that Nez Perce should have an accent mark. I corrected both errors.

Over the next few days or weeks, I repeatedly corrected these errors. I was quickly joined by a librarian at Washington State University,* where McWhorter's papers are housed in the archives. I had to join Wikipedia as a registered user in order to stop bots from automatically reverting my corrections back to the errors that preceded them. But, even as a registered user, it was a battle to remove the accent mark. Through reason, evidence, and persistence, the librarian and I ultimately won the battle and the Nez Perce entry has offered the correct spelling of Nez Perce for 13 years. The Chief Joseph myth, too, has been largely absent from the entry. Other users made other edits, and the article became a credible encyclopedia entry.

During my first months as a registered user of Wikipedia, I made many contributions. Another battle with other users ensued when I attempted to correct agreement with Ronald Reagan's faulty memory (or lies) about his student days. I did not then have access to the not yet published The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014) by Rick Perlstein, but offered some of the work of Lou Cannon refuting Reagan's claims. The battle between Reagan partisans, on the one hand, and partisans for accurate history, on the other, grew so fierce that eventually the entire section was removed from the article. Then, a few years later, Reagan's lie reappeared in the article in another briefer section with a footnote to Cannon's book that refutes the claim.

When students ask about Wikipedia as a source for the past few years, I have told them about the Nez Perce spelling war and the dangers of correcting the memory of a President who died of Alzheimer's. Sometimes they would ask whether I might try to correct the error in the Reagan article again. It should not be too difficult to recover my password, or create a new one. In December 2019, I restored Reagan's "leadership" of student protests his freshman year to his "participation". My previous Wikipedia edits had been in 2014. The truth about Reagan's participation still stands today. How long before a mob tears it down again?

My own memory could be faulty, however, or at least short on details.** A search through my own Wikipedia edits this morning confirms that I added Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power (2003) on 12 March 2007, but the context appears to be the narrative about him making up facts during his broadcasts of baseball games, not his false claims about student leadership. I also added Garry Wills, Reagan's America: Innocents at Home (1987) that day, and many other small edits.

For a few months in spring 2007, I made many edits to articles about US history and literature, and to chess, as well as a few other topics. At least once, I was corrected for adding what appeared to be original research. The insights of experts on a topic are welcome only insofar as they accord with general knowledge. Sometimes that will favor error when truth is elusive.

Wikipedia editing proved to be a form of social media with its own network of personal relationships and friendships with people I have never met. In spring 2007, a new chess website came online and I joined that fall. It had active forums that helped pull me away from Wikipedia. For a time, at least, the truth of checkmate offered better grounding for arguments than the evidence of primary sources that counter the memories of a dead president. If I am not mistaken, I also joined Facebook about that time. In fall 2007, I started Patriots and Peoples.


*The Nez Perce talk page shows that she had made edits two years before I joined.
**I may have made a lot of edits while not logged in, and then logged in to try to protect these edits from bots and well-meaning fools.

Paul Revere's Ride

Paul Revere's letter to Jeremy Belknap (1798) offers his own account of an event that has been much memorialized, mythologized, and misunderstood in the centuries since. The complete letter is available from the Massachusetts Historical Society.

In Medford, I awaked the Captain of the Minute men; & after that, I alarmed almost every House, till I got to Lexington. I found Mrs. Messrs. Hancock & Adams at the Rev. Mr. Clark's; I told them my errand, and inquired for Mr. Daws; they said he had not been there; I related the story of the two officers, & supposed that He must have been stopped, as he ought to have been there before me. After I had been there about half an Hour, Mr. Daws came; after we refreshid our selves, we and set off for Concord, to secure the Stores, &c. there.
Paul Revere to Jeremy Belknap

Sarah Palin's account differs from Revere's, from accounts by leading historians (David Hackett Fischer's account is cited most often), from Wikipedia before her followers attempted to rectify the omission, and even differs substantially from the account in the not always reliable right-wing history in A Patriot's History of the United States (2004) by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. Although a few details that she places near the center of her narrative can be found at the edges of the narrative in A Patriot's History.

[General Thomas Gage] issued orders to arrest the political firebrands and rhetoricians Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were reported in the Lexington area, and to secure the cannons from the colonists. Gage therefore sought to kill two birds with one stone when, on the night of April 18, 1775, he sent 1,000 soldiers from Boston to march up the road via Lexington to Concord. If he could surprise the colonials and could capture Adams, Hancock, and the supplies quietly, the situation might be defused. But the patriots learned of British intentions and signaled the British route with lanterns from the Old North Church, whereupon two riders, Paul Revere and William Dawes left Boston by different routes to rouse the minutemen. Calling, "To Arms! To Arms!" Revere and Dawes's daring mission successfully alerted the patriots at Lexington, at no small cost to Revere, who fell from his horse after warning Hancock and Adams and was captured at one point, but then escaped.
A Patriot's History, 72-73.

Palin's account garbles these events with half-truths and egregious error, much as Congresswoman Michele Bachmann's placement of Lexington and Concord in New Hampshire brought scorn upon her and raised doubts whether any of the Tea Party leaders know enough American history to pass a high school exam.

Needless to say, my blog feed this morning has listed quite a few references to historians and journalists skewering Palin's account. Ed Brayton asserts, "she babbles like an unprepared freshman in history class." Larry Cebula develops this theme with a clip from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, and also draws attention to revisions of Wikipedia by Palin apologists. He notes, "she tries to fake her way through with the unprepared student's classic recipe of one-half facts that are wrong and one-half trumpeting what the student believes are the key themes of the course." John Fea repeats Andrew Sullivan's harsh psychoanalysis of Palin, "[o]ne of the most pernicious and dangerous features of Palin is her clinical refusal to understand reality, to accept error, to acknowledge when the facts she has cited are not actually facts, but delusions." Sullivan also comments upon Wikipedia vandalism. The Washington Post employs the Wikipedia entry war as its lead to observe the differences between Michelle Bachmann admitting her error and turning into a joke about liberal Massachusetts and Sarah Palin's claim, "I didn't mess up." Kurt Weldon's brief entry offers a memorable line: "Ignorance is not merely bliss--it's mandatory."


Paul Revere and the Second Amendment

Palin's effort to connect Revere to what would become an issue of gun control and interpretations of the Second Amendment does adhere to a theme in some histories.

He who warned, uh, the British that they weren't going to be taking away our arms.
Sarah Palin

Schweikart and Allen note:

[T]he people of Massachusetts established a revolutionary government and raised an army of soldiers known as minutemen (able to fight on a minutes notice).
A Patriot's History, 72

Revere stated clearly that warning the minutemen of British troop movements was his first task.

Schweikart and Allen also position themselves in a debate regarding the extent of firearm and large weapon possession in revolutionary Massachusetts.

[G]uns were so prevalent that citizens did not need to list them specifically. On the eve of the Revolution, Massachusetts citizens were well armed, and not only with small weapons but, collectively, with artillery.
A Patriot's History, 72.

It is clear, even from this pro-gun account from a pair of far-right historians, that Massachusetts established a "well-regulated militia" to serve at the behest of the revolutionary colonial government. Moreover, I rarely hear conservative advocates of the Second Amendment pushing for my right to have an M1A1 Abrams tank in the driveway and surely that is much closer in spirit to the possession of cannon in 1775. Palin seems to want to push this issue a bit farther than Schweikart and Allen, although theirs may be the text that she is misremembering.


Palin's Apologetics

Former Governor Sarah Palin did get something right in a strange twist of fate. In an interview with Chris Wallace on FOX, Palin said:

Reporters don't seem to be understanding it. Even your own Shep Smith there on FOX News, he announced the other day that I was on some publicity tour. I wanted to say, Shep, take it one step futher, what am I publicizing on this tour? I'm publicizing Americana, and our foundation, and how important it is that we learn about our past and our challenges, and victories throughout American history, so that we can successfully proceed forward. Very heady days, rough waters ahead of us, Chris. We need to make sure that we have a strong grasp of our foundational victories so that we can move forward.
Palin to Chris Wallace, FOX News Sunday, at 14:13

She certainly publicizes the need to learn history every time she speaks about the past, for inevitably she makes the news by getting facts mixed up. She then stays in the headlines by insisting that she did not get things wrong. The more she offers her distorted understanding, the more clearly she publicizes the need to learn history. In the long-run that strategy will backfire, but the short-run is her forte.


Palin's English

Finally, we should not overlook this comic piece by Craig Medred in the Alaska Dispatch: "Sarah Palin's Problem is Her English, Not Her History." Palin speaks the rare dialect Northeast Wasillian.

National Rifle Association member that she is, Palin certainly knew Revere wasn't firing off "warning shots.” There were no warning shots in the days of the single-shot, hard-to-reload musket. Nobody wasted shots, let alone ammunition, on warnings. They shot to try to hit something. Palin just slipped up there with her messaging, which is easy to understand because her problem has never been her history so much as her grammar and vocabulary.
...
This is nothing new. Palin has always spoken some form of Wasillian, or even maybe Northeast Wasillian, an extremely rare dialect.
Medred

On a blog that picked up this piece, a commentator noted that Northeast Wasillian is Palin's third language, after "Ida-the-ho-ian and Wasillian."



Editing note: In the original post I incorrectly attributed to John Fea words of Andrew Sullivan that he quoted on his fine history blog. I have corrected the error. Andrew Sullivan is not in my blog feed, while The Way of Improvement Leads Home is one that I read regularly.

The End of Google

I found my own blog this morning through an unusual route. That is, I found another blog based upon Patriots and Peoples, but without my input, nor my explicit consent. It was not up-to-date, nor complete, and it contained alterations that I dislike and oppose. The blog in question is a sample Mobiforumz blog (I will not provide the link--Google them if you want). It is called Journey of James Stripes and consists of posts I wrote 18 April - 2 August, 2008. It has all the appearances of having been created by some webcrawling robot. Each of my posts is attributed to "hidayath," who may or may not be a real person.

Theft might be the right word.

I was ego-surfing as part of the process of helping a young man just out of his teenage years understand how a potential employer might look at his MySpace or Facebook page, or use Google, to supplement his self-disclosure in a job application. I've been ego-surfing longer than I've known the term, and am well aware of what comes up when my name is fed into search engines. This practice of checking up on myself was part of how I evaluated Ask.com when someone owning a few shares in the company was touting it. It returned a lot of unrelated junk a year ago. It does better now, but still lacks Google's ability to find what it should.

Because I have an uncommon name, a search for me finds mostly stuff I've written. Many of the hits that are unrelated to me connect to "St. James Infirmary Blues" by the White Stripes, or Jack White attending a James Bond premier, or articles in the Stars and Stripes newspaper with photos by Stephanie James.

If articles I've written for scholarly journals are not returned in the first few pages by a search engine, it's not worth using. My article on Russell Means, for example, should be found easily. If one plumbs the depths, my contribution concerning "blind swine" to Edward Winter's enterprise should appear.

Most often Patriots and Peoples is the top hit. It seems as though Google thinks that this blog is my most important work.

When I found a Mobiforumz blog with my name in the title in the first page of hits, I was curious. My first glance at the site brought to memory many frustrating Google searches for specific information. Often I use the web to quickly find a credible source of real information--a book or website that I recall dimly. For years, Amazon has filtered its way to the top of most searches. In the past few years Wikipedia has risen to a place of preeminence. As the universal encyclopedia written equally by the ignorant and the knowledgeable improves, Google's tendency becomes less fatal.

More and more, however, it seems that searches through Google turn up information that originates with Wikipedia or Amazon, but was cannibalized from there for another site. Some cannibals add a service, Pickii, for instance sells books too. Many of these other sites contribute no original data, but exist solely to offer an abundance of the advertisements absent from the originating sites. These Para-Sites are an inevitable product of late-capitalism, and its tendency to nurture marketing saavy more than quality product development. They are the "fast food" of an information diet. They produce information bloat akin to what one would expect from a steady diet of Big Macs.

Copyright Issues

Patriots and Peoples carries a Creative Commons license. Today I changed this license as a consequence of my ego-surfing misadventure. Previously I had encouraged derivative work, thinking of the sort of use that was called "fair use" before lawyers and the free market went after the work of honest people.

In K-12, higher education, and after-school programs and workshops, teachers face conflicting information about their rights, and their students’ rights, to quote copyrighted material. They also confront complex, restrictive copyright policies in their own institutions. As a result, teachers use less effective teaching techniques, teach and transmit erroneous copyright information, fail to share innovative instructional approaches, and do not take advantage of new digital platforms.
The Cost of Copyright Confusion for Media Literacy (2007)

When I added my CC license, I chose "Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States." After witnessing derivative work with advertising hyperlinks thrown randomly into the text, dating site marketing, and other changes, I had to reconsider. This work now carries the "Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States" license. I understood before I wrote my first Amazon review that once something is in cyberspace, the author loses control. Socrates said the same thing about printing speeches in the Phaedrus, but the global internet kills authors with a relish unknown in ancient Greece.

Presenting one's corpus to cannibals is another matter.

Derivative Work

Chesstiger's "Two rook pawns with an extra pawn on the opposite side" builds on something I posted as "Fox in the Chicken Coop." Although I created the diagram found there, it almost certainly has been independently created by others. Nevertheless, Chesstiger mentioned my Chess Skills blog when he posted the diagram with his own extended analysis. Scholarship is the usual term for building on the work of others, and it should not require explicit authorization by the copyright holder. Still, the Creative Commons license seemed to connote a world where knowledge is freely shared for everyone's benefit. That was my intent. The license change should not affect responsible extensions of this sort.

My writing is also replicated by Reuters and similar services with full attribution (see Lee Resolution). That derivative work does no harm, and may confer benefits both to me and to readers. Reuters also has explicit permission. Alas, Google does not pick up these syndicated articles often, at least not any of mine.

Google seems to be finding too easily this new Para-Site containing my words in an alien context hostile to my intent. As it crowds its way onto the search pages with others that mine Wikipedia, Google loses its value. Google's recent drop in stock value has been part of the painful economic correction afflicting all markets; however, if the search engine can be hijacked so easily, it may be still overpriced.

Tribal Names

Do all the people named the Sioux call themselves Lakota? Does an accent mark belong on Nez Perce? Are the Chippewa related to the Ojibwa (or Ojibwe)? Is Blackfeet plural for Blackfoot?

Each name has a history. Historians should favor the names in the primary sources from which they work, and those preferred by the tribe today. They also should learn and relate the histories of these names.

A few years ago, the Wikipedia entry for Nez Perce claimed that Nez Percé was favored by most scholars. “Ignorant scholars!” I said this phrase to myself, as I changed the article only to see it change back the next day. Back and forth the name went, until it finally stabilized after some discussion. (Also see more on historians and Wikipedia.)

For most of the twentieth century, the Yakama Nation employed the spelling Yakima—also the name of a city in Washington state—but officially changed the spelling to Yakama, which conforms to the spelling employed by Isaac I. Stevens in the treaty that some of them signed in 1855. This treaty was a principle cause of the war mentioned in passing, “stronger tribes such as the Yakimas and their allies put up a stiffer fight” (emphasis added), in James Donovan, A Terrible Glory: Custer and the Little Bighorn—the Last Great Battle of the American West (2008), 17. This spelling error, as I’m calling it, is not fatal to Donovan’s book, but it offers a subtle clue to a weakness in his research. If he skews toward error minor points regarding tribes far from Little Bighorn, he might do something similar for those that killed Custer. Donovan’s work on Custer’s last battle might prove more authoritative in narrating the side of those that lost the battle than of the motives and actions of the victors, and of the terrible consequences they suffered.

Two pages later, Donovan is back on the Plains among the Lakota Sioux, where he tells us, “Sioux being a bastardized French word that they despised” (19). He does not explain that Sioux is shortened from Nadouessioux, which comes from an Ojibwa word for adders (snakes) and connotes enemy. Lakota, on the other hand, means ally or friend, as does Dakota and Nakota. The Seven Council Fires that comprise the Sioux Nation (as they appear in many U.S. government documents) speak three dialects of a common language. Slight differences in pronunciation account for the variable first consonant in Lakota/Dakota/Nakota. There is no need to add the word Sioux after Lakota, as Donovan does consistently, nor is such usage inherently wrong. Combined with other nuances, such usage merely heightens my attentiveness to other possible errors of fact or interpretation.

A Terrible Glory was thoroughly researched and is well written. My quibbles with a few points of Donovan’s book have not yet led me to disagreement with Robert M. Utley’s assessment that the work is “exemplary” (from a blurb on the back of the dust jacket).

Patriot’s History

On the other hand, A Patriot’s History of the United States (2004) by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen employ the term Lakota Sioux in a manner that shatters confidence in their authority.

Farther north the mighty Lakota Sioux also resisted white incursions. Their struggle began in 1862-63 in Minnesota, a theater of the war that ended when U.S. Army General John Pope achieved victory and hanged 38 Sioux warriors as punishment.
Schweikart and Allen, 408.

Colonel Henry Sibley led the troops and usually gets credit for this victory. Yet, the authors of A Patriot’s History are not completely wrong in mentioning Pope, who was Sibley’s superior officer and had charge of the Military Department of the Northwest. Their account of the Indian side of this conflict is another matter.

The Mdewakanton and Wahpekute bands of the Santee are Dakota not Lakota. There was no Lakota uprising in Minnesota in 1862. Moreover, their struggles between accommodation and resistance did not begin with Little Crow’s uprising in 1862, but before the Treaties of 1837 and 1858. The resistance that led to war, and that led to the largest mass hanging in U.S. history, resulted from many factors. Some of the leading elements in the failures of the policy of accommodation stemmed from U.S. failures to deliver on promises made in these treaties, capriciousness by Indian agent Thomas J. Galbraith, and massive influx of non-Indian settlers.

Gary Clayton Anderson’s Little Crow: Spokesman for the Sioux (1986) offers detailed analysis.

… one might wonder why Little Crow agreed to join the war effort. He had always been an accommodationist, and had consistently used his persuasive abilities to prevent violence. … Little Crow undoubtedly concluded that by joining the soldiers, he would be reinstated in his position as speaker for the Mdewakanton tribe. … His decision to join a doomed war effort certainly contradicted his past behavior, but it did not run counter to the traditional obligation of a Sioux warrior to his community and people—that of giving his life when such a sacrifice became necessary for the benefit of the whole.
Anderson, Little Crow, 133-34.

Mdewakanton leader Little Crow was a patriot.