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21 05 2007

Wikipedian’s view of world history

Posted by: frank in web society

Here’s a great example of editorial differences of opinion about history within the wikipedia community, this one relating to the US / Britain War of 1812 as it relates to the Napoleonic Wars

  • Revision 1

Smaller scale conflict occurred in North America with the USA attempting to take advantage of Britain’s pre-occupation with Napoleon and invade Canada, all attempts, however, were defeated.

  • Revision 2

Smaller scale conflict occurred in North America with the USA finally reacting to years of British assaults on US shipping, but the conflict ended inconclusively.

So who is right? I guess it depends on who you are…

This entry was posted on Monday, May 21st, 2007 at 11:40 am and is filed under web society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Wikipedian’s view of world history”

  1. Tech 4D » Blog Archive » More on Wikipedian's view of world history says:
    June 6th, 2007 at 11:41 am

    [...] news! - Earlier I pointed out a trivial example of conflicting editorial views on history within Wikipedia. Recently, someone resolved the conflict by completely deleting the entire [...]

  2. Tech 4D » Blog Archive » Is Wikipedia an anachronism? says:
    June 11th, 2007 at 1:07 pm

    [...] Wikipedia is the encyclopedia format itself because most interesting topics defy consensus. Take my original example of the American War of 1812 - was it the result of upstart United States taking advantage of [...]

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