Wikipedia: pro, con, and something in between

I wanted to start a new thread on Wikipedia, because even though it's not a topic of this class in any immediate sense, it really has reshaped the way we all think about research.

For the record, I am not anti-Wikipedia. I've looked at plenty of its entries, and at this point in its existence I'd consider most any entry having to do with a fairly common and uncontroversial topic--the city of Belgrade, chaos theory, mammals--just as good if not better than the Encyclopedia Brittanica (and free to boot!). Even the controversial topics that are the most frequently vandalized and repaired, like the ones on politics, can be really illuminating if you look at their editing history to see how the debate over what constitites "fact" and what constitutes "interpretation" shakes out.

The problem is in the margins--the vast part of the Wikiuniverse that hasn't been fully fleshed out yet. There's no entry for Chicano literature, Hispanic-American literature, or Latino literature, though there are scattered entries on various authors. The entry on "Chicano" is actually, I think, pretty good (except for this odd statement: "The heritage of many Chicanos originates in San Gabriel, NM, first established in 1598 by Juan de Onate": some proud New Mexican wrote that, I know, but it makes absolutely no sense statistically!). But note if you go there that the section on "cultural aspects" is nearly all about music, though there is a list of Chicano poets/writers with stubs and links. Now, you could simply conclude that someone just needs to fill in all those stubs and keep adding information, and eventually, in another year or ten, Wikipedia will become an outstanding reference source on the subject.

Right now, however, the entries that you would find if you searched "chicano literature" would give you a pretty off-kilter sense of what people who are trained in the field consider important. For instance, among the 10 entries listed as most "relevant" by the search engine are two long biographies of Chicano Lit scholars (written by themselves? by their friends?). Someone looking for a quick information fix would look at this and conclude that these were the two best, most representative, or most respected scholars in the field--which would not be accurate. Only 3 of the authors we've read (or, in the case of Richard Rodriguez, intended to read) in this class appear in the top 20. Does that mean I'm perversely out of touch with who and what is really important in the field, or that the mechanism for ranking things according to the number of hits they get may not be a good method for sorting information? It's the same problem with doing research by Google's search engine: it's too easy for the less-important bit of information (or in some cases, wrong or extremely partial information) to masquerade as more significant than it actually is.

Of course, the scholarly publications stored in the library are not a perfect format either. Every academic knows that there is a lot of hack work out there, and much of it, unfortunately, winds up in the very reference books that students (and Wikipedia editors) tend to go to most readily and cite as authoritative. (This is why I directed you to articles in refereed journals.) I was fuming a bit about the incredibly banal entry on "American literature," which doesn't reflect at all the interesting turns of the past 2 decades of scholarship, and particularly the demeaning add-on about "other ethnics" at the end. But the sources it cites include a scholarly reference work. . . from a publishing house that those of us who've been around for a while know to be kind of a publishing mill that recycles second-hand information.

If everyone is an equal participant in the creation of knowledge (which is the radically democratic idea of Wikipedia, one I'm very attracted to), then no one's knowledge means more than anyone else's. But it also makes me think of Mr. Incredible's unsettling words: "When everyone is special, no one is." Or, if arguments between Wikipedia editors who disagree get settled by citing some scholarly reference or another, then maybe it's not so radical after all, since the library is the ultimate authority.

An excellent article in the New Yorker recently discussed this paradox: see
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060731fa_fact

Genre: tragicomedy?

To reiterate one of Isabelle's discussion questions from Monday: is this play a tragedy, a comedy, or some hybrid genre, like a tragicomedy?

On the "sinking badges" thread there's an interesting discussion going about how the final scene throws the status of "reality" into question. Obviously this is one of Valdez's favorite strategies, one we saw in Bandido!: to use the physical space of the stage, and specifically the double set, to force us to question whether what is occurring and being said onstage is "real" or not.

Theatre can do this in a way that film generally doesn't. As we've discussed before, film tends to envelop the viewer in its particular point of view--even if there are multiple cameras rolling and the shots are done from multiple points of view, editing makes the film look seamless. Even fantasy films have a strong "reality-effect," which is why when we see a film we use language like, "I got completely caught up in it" or "it really pulled me into its world." The powerful reality-effect is one of the things that critics both love and hate about film as a medium.

The double set suggests something like a metacommentary or metafiction, i.e. a fiction about fiction; that's a favorite postmodern ploy. More recently there have been a spate of "metafilms," where the camera pulls back and you learn that this is just a film about a film. But in Valdez's world of 1985, this wasn't yet a familiar device.

Every reference to "stinking badges" you could hope for

See this link--proof that it is possible to spend way too much time on the internet, but very useful for our purposes:

http://www.darryl.com/badges/allindex.shtml

Here we are, aqui estamos. . .

. . . When I sent you all off to find some "emergent" forms of Chicana/o literature and hinted that you might find something in the blogosphere, I didn't think I'd have to go so far as to make one myself . . .

But here we are, plugged into the global textual leviathan that is Google-universe, and anything you post on here is liable to be searched by some avid reader of ChicLit (or whatever it comes to be called), far in the future.

For those not in the know/in the class: this is a rather last-minute blog created for the UCSC undergraduate course, Chicana/o Literature, in fall 2006.