Wikipedia as primary source for professional historical research? The case of on-line IPN catalogue
Yesterday the polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) started to publishing its catalogue indexes. Available on the specjal website katalog.bip.ipn.gov.pl data contain information about resources related to (among other things) staff of the communistic security services and important members of parties such as PPR, PZPR or a facade party of the communists (after 1944) – . Published catalogues also inform about materials related to the people, who now perform important duties in the independent Poland (starting from the president). But there is no data about actual member of parliament. In the opinion of the IPN representatives, this is because of the actual election campaign.
From our point of view, two aspects of this eevent is important. First: official publishing historical data on the Internet and second – the Wikipedia case, which began when Marcin Jagodzinski, author of well known polish blog netto.blox.pl, published a post describing how historians of IPN use Wikipedia as a credible source of historical data.
One card of the catalogue, published on this page shows data for Andrzej Werblan, member of the PZPR Central Committee. In one point we can see reference to the two sources: book by Tadeusz Moldawa and – Wikipedia. Very similar exemple can be found on that page.
This situation is now being reported on the main polish web portals. Andrzej Aresniuk, the spokesman of Institute of National Remembrance told Gazeta Wyborcza that this is only a mistake. He pointed that there is a primary source – a book by Tadeusz Moldawa, so there is no problem.
We still don’t know how Wikipedia was used in the research which was done to prepare publishing a catalogue. But one of the main principle of Wikipedia is that it can’t be used as a reliable source of information for the scientific research.
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Institute of National Remembrance — Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (Polish: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej — Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu; IPN) is a Polish government-affiliated research institute with lustration prerogatives and prosecution powers founded by specific legislation. It specialises in the legal and historical sciences and in particular the recent history of Poland.
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Kategorie: In english
Tiffany Sanders (aka MadameX at BlogCatalog), who has a degree in law, pointed out a similarly disturbing trend among some lawyers: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/29/technology/29wikipedia.html?_r=1&ex=1188446400&en=366f0f5ddfac3046&ei=5070&oref=slogin
I encourage my undergraduate students in an introductory course to use it for basic background reading, but I also preach the principle of verifiability. The idea that this stuff would make its way into scholarship is scary.