Dove's Eye View

Wikipedia

How many of you knew that Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia, is written entirely by the public? Anybody can post to Wikipedia and anybody can revise anything on it.

Since I started grad school at a small, selective liberal arts college, I've been staggered at how many people, students and faculty alike, use Wikipedia as a reference. The head reference librarian, trying to help me find out something about Islam, searched Wikipedia. Classmates and teachers pass around links to Wikipedia definitions.

Well, folks, try looking up some subject about which you know a great deal. Choose something that's a little obscure. Months ago I happened to look up the country of Lebanon, and found that the entry covering my hometown seemed to have been written by an Israeli. One tipoff was he insisted on spelling the name in an Anglicization of the Hebrew, and gave three different Hebrew versions. By the time you read this, the entry will have been edited. If you click on "discussion" you will see my disgusted critique. If you click on Edit, you can change the entry at will.

What if I decided to write up an entry for Lod*, Israel? I have lots of Palestinian friends from Lidda, the town's name until 1948. Never mind that I'm not an historian or scholar, and that I have my own particular Lebanese-American point of view. I could click over right this minute and write up whatever I want about Lod. Perhaps some alert Wiki-minder might notice the change, and if it's egregious, they might change it back. But if the town or the country or whatever the topic is obscure enough, perhaps not.

I love Wikipedia, don't get me wrong, but the way people use it leads me to believe that many don't understand its true nature.

The software for Wikipedia, and any other wiki, allows anybody to contribute, edit, revise or delete anything. Do you understand what that means? Any entry in the place can be slapped up by anybody. There is no editor in charge, only lots of busybodies who look at changes to see if they're malicious. It's the collective mind at work.

This can sometimes lead to good information. It can sometimes lead to weird information, or bad information.

In Wikis, as in anything else, let the reader beware.

Rebecca Blood pointed me to the Guardian article that sparked this: can you trust Wikipedia?

*Lod, Israel, according to Wikipedia, is the hometown of St. George, the patron saint of my father's village. Which may explain the name of one of its infamous sons. Read about him if you want a sample of the Wikipedia way.

You gotta love Wikipedia - but carefully.

Moorish Girl In SF

I was there and have photos to prove it. I'm too busy to upload them, sorry.

Just finished reading Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits - very moving, beautifully written with spare but evocative prose. Go buy it.

When the semester ends, I'll read 1000 Years of Good Prayers, by the other author in the linked picture. Yiyun Li teaches in the department where I'm a student, and sends her child to the pre-school my son attends, so I see her all the time. But I've got a reading list of poets and novels to get through in the next 5 weeks so the book must wait. It's a prize-winner, and she admires some of the same authors I do, so I'm looking forward to it.

Sorry for light posting, but something had to give. More on grad school later.

History: Palestine and Israel On Facing Pages

Len Traubman alerts us to this: Professors' history project opens new chapter for Israeli, Palestinian students (from USATODAY.com).

two university professors aim to change the way the conflict is taught by exposing Palestinian students to Israeli history lessons and Israeli students to the Palestinian version of history.

The project is the work of Dan Bar-On, a social psychology professor at Ben Gurion University in Beersheba, a city in southern Israel, and Sami Adwan, an education professor at Bethlehem University in the West Bank. Together with teams of Israeli and Palestinian historians, they devised a series of booklets that set the competing versions of history side-by-side on the same pages for students.

The professors say the project is an effort to bridge the chasm between the two peoples. "The way a conflict or history is taught in the classroom can either support that conflict or (support) co-existence," Adwan says. "The project aims to break down the stereotypes and build nuanced understandings."

Says Bar-On: "What we're talking about is the disarming of history, where the teaching of history no longer feeds the conflict."

Bay Area Synagogues Support Palestinian Business Women

This just in via e-mail:

Join Kehilla Community Synagogue, Tikkun, and the Middle East Children's Alliance in celebrating
The Empowerment of Palestinian Women
and HELP RAISE MONEY FOR ASALA

ASALA is a member-run NGO that empowers Palestinian women by giving them small loans and training in business. Over 1,500 women in the West Bank and Gaza are now finding their voice and new hope through ASALA.

Details below the jump.

Nobel Peace Prize

We Arabs ought to feel proud today: IAEA, ElBaradei share Nobel Peace Prize.

(I'd assumed the head of the IAEA would be a scientist, perhaps a nuclear physicist, but Baradei was trained as a lawyer.)

Melkite Bishop: Priests Can Marry

I normally don't cover Catholic issues, since I was baptized a Methodist and raised a secular humanist. But I harbor kind feelings for my father's Eastern rite church, the Melkite Catholics. Here's the patriarch of my father's people throwing bombshells at Ratzinger, via the New York Times: Uninvited Guest Turns Up at Catholic Synod: Issue of Married Priests.

"Celibacy has no theological foundation," Gregorios III Laham, who attended the synod as the patriarch of the Melkite Catholics, an Eastern Rite church, said at an early session, official briefers reported. "Married priests are admitted," he said.

After that bombshell, the Vatican cut back on the detail provided to reporters on the talks unfolding among 256 bishops, who came to discuss on-the-ground concerns from around the world.

Village level priests were allowed to marry in our church, up until the last decade or so, when John Paul II cracked down and insisted - no more married priests. Whether the Roman pope really has the authority to enforce this rule is under debate in our church, which has a relationship with Rome that is supposed to be that of equals. I.e., the bishop of Rome is supposed to be (in the Orthodox view) a colleague and equal of the other bishops/patriarchs - especially the 4 patriarchs of the original sees - Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem and Constantinople.

You don't care about this much detail, I'm certain. Just let it be known that the Melkite patriarch lobbied for contraception at Vatican II in the 60s, and he's lobbying against priestly celibacy now in the new millenium. Good for him!