[Air-l] Wikipedia, Rosa Parks, and "The work of race in an age of digital reproduction"?

[Michael Zimmer]

What do you mean by the version being "permanently deleted from the  
public history of this page"? These instances of vandalism are  
retrievable from the page history, as far as I can tell. Do you mean  
something else?

For what it's worth, such instances of vandalism [1] are common on  
Wikipedia, especially with ongoing events. Some of the vandal  
activity on the Rosa Parks page has been reported here [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vandalism_in_progress

On Oct 25, 2005, at 8:50 PM, Mary K. Bryson wrote:

> This week I am teaching Radhika Gajjala's wonderful Cyber Selves,  
> and Lisa
> Nakamura's CyberTypes (who writes about "The work of race in an age of
> digital reproduction") in a course on new media and the  
> possibilities for
> democratic public pedagogies.
> When I heard that Rosa Parks had died yesterday, I went online to  
> look at
> the digital "rendering" of this life, and this death.
> On wikipedia, the entry for Rosa Parks contained what I first  
> reacted to
> with disbelief as an extraordinary and somehow, incredible and
> incomprehensible racist paragraph under the entry - Death and  
> Funeral. It
> was late. I looked at the page again today, and then the history of  
> the
> page. It would appear that this particular version of the entry on  
> October
> 24 has been permanently deleted from the public history of this  
> page. This
> prompted me to look at more of the history of the revisions - just  
> those
> made on October 25/05. Not so extraordinary at all, it turns out. I  
> have
> compiled a short list of some of the contributions to this  
> wikipedia entry
> for my class tomorrow. I don't know enough about Wikipedia to know  
> how the
> revision made on October 24 could summarily be deleted from history.
>
> At any rate, with a sense of caution in putting this "out there" -  
> I am
> sending what I have found, and I have just started to look...
>
> http://educ.ubc.ca/faculty/bryson/565/wikipediarp.html
>
> Mary
>
>
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