Investigating Wikipedia History

The first entry on Dmitri Shostakovich’s Wikipedia page is from September 26, 2006. The tone is very informal and uses the word “cheeky” several times, which makes me think that this article was written by someone without a scholarly background. The author briefly summarizes Shostakovich’s life, lists his fifteen symphonies, and provides a brief synopsis and analysis of each. Some of these synopses include sentence fragments, which does not lend credibility to the article. A link to a list of all of Shostakovich’s compositions does not appear until much later.

The first edit happens a month later on October 29, 2001. The editor changed the formatting and adds a few small details, such as Shostakovich’s birthday and where he lived. After this, edits are few and far between until, a year later, someone adds more content. The added content, however, contains more analysis of his music rather than an unbiased account of his life.

Minor revisions on formatting and spelling continues until July 2003 when the first graphic is added. This image breaks one of the ten rules about web design: it is bloated. When I accessed this page, the image was huge and the text wrapped around it oddly.

 In March 2004, an editor named Henry Flower (I looked at his Wikipedia page and he is a teacher and lawyer from Scotland) spent several days updated and expanding the biographical information about Shostakovich. He adds a table of contents at the top of the page so that it is easier to navigate the webpage. In May, he adds even more content and makes the bloated image smaller, too. He changed Shostakovich’s Wikipedia page from a conglomeration of non-scholarly facts and opinions about the composer to a more reliable resource.

Over the next fourteen years, people added, deleted, and edited the content, but Henry Flower’s extensive work in 2004 set the stage for the main organization and content of the website.

In 2015, a minor controversy arose over whether or not the word “Communist” should be included in the phrase “Joining the Party.” Eventually, one person gave up and “Communist” was left out.

The latest addition to the page was September 14, 2018, and it contained only minor revisions.

On Joseph Stalin’s Wikipedia page, the first article was created in October 2001. It was more advanced than Shostakovich’s page in that it started with sections. There was even a “to be added” section for future contributors. Stalin’s page was written in more formal and academic language than Shostakovich’s, but it was still very vague. From the beginning, however, the editors of Stalin’s page seemed more inclined toward accuracy and objectivity than those who edited Shostakovich’s Wikipedia page.

Until January 2002, the changes on Stalin’s page were minute facts, like childhood nicknames, or formatting changes, like the addition of more white space. In 2002, someone added a significant chunk to the information connecting Stalin and World War II. Later in January, someone noticed that a claim on the page was not from a neutral perspective and changed. By looking through the years, keeping a neutral tone of voice is important to the editors of Stalin’s Wikipedia page, though the editors certainly do not keep a neutral tone in their comments. They use personal attacks such as, “Leave that sentence alone,” and “[We’ve] replaced one hack with another…”

For a while in 2004, the page dealt with spammers who deleted the entire page. Right away, members of the Wiki-Police reverted Stalin’s webpage to its previous state.

The most recent changes are from today, the 20^th of September, 2018. The last person changed passive voice to active voice and clunky diction to more easily understandable words. Now, there are many sub-headings with hyperlinks to easily navigate the page. Over the last seventeen years, there has been much expansion on the original, skimpy biography.  

The page for Music in the Soviet Union began in October 2004. There was never much content on it, and it remained the same, minus some spelling errors, and focused on national music and folk music until 2008 when someone radically altered the page. They deleted all of the previous content and updated it to be about Russian classical, jazz, and movie music during Soviet reign. Still, the page did not have a lot of information on it until May 2013, when someone updated many of the sections to make them more complete. Now, there is much more information on the page than ever before, but it is not as professionally kept and updated as Stalin’s page.

This past April, someone vandalized the site. It was quickly removed, but the vandal was persistent and re-added his or her comment to the page two more times before giving up.

The last time this page was updated was in August 2018.

In the three articles that I looked at, editors were very active in 2004. It was during this time that most of the changes, especially in the first two articles, were made. It was in 2004, too, when most of the scholarly, “heavy lifting” research and work was put into the sites. Most of the major content changes for Shostakovich and Stalin’s pages were made in 2004 and the articles have only been tweaked since then. I looked at several of the major contributors to these articles, and, from their profiles, they seemed like scholarly people who have a passion for research and sharing their interests with the world. It is important to remember, however, that Wikipedia is accessible to be edited by anyone from anywhere; therefore, it should still be used with caution when writing academic articles.

Word Count: 937 words.