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

[Mary K. Bryson]

This is the Wikipedia history for the Rosa Parks entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rosa_Parks&limit=500&action=histor
y

There is no entry for October 24/05. The record of the page I saw on October
24 appears to have been erased. I will track this down, eventually.

Mary


On 10/25/05 7:46 PM, "Michael Zimmer" <mtz206 at nyu.edu> wrote:

> 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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> 
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