History on the Web

There is a lot of history on the Web. Being an historian, I found this remarkable, even if I don't know whether to like it or not.

Many of my fellow-historians are weary of history on the web and complain about the lack of quality. At the same time, they know that many people use the Web as there first and often only source of information. And even if many would hesitate to admit it, they use it al lot themselves for information. More than the quality of historical information on the Web, I will concern myself with its nature. What is written and by whom, where does the information come from. What does it focus on, what is left out.

I want to find out what image of history the Web presents. Therefore, the method is Web-centric, using search engines and link libraries as starting points. Sometimes, it may be necessary to put the web results in perspective - then it may be necessary to use some additional resources.

Perhaps it is not possible to say anything about history writing on the Web in general, but that's why this is a blog. If I think the experiment fails, I will stop it. That is for me to decide.

So what is History? Wikipedia has a lot to say about this. I have compared some of the 'general' history pages in different languages. They differ a lot in length.

The English page is longest. Some other pages make the impression they took the English page as an example or source of inspiration, and this seems plausible as the language of the Web is English, is hard to verify this. Of the major pages (English, German, French, Spanish, Portugese, Italian and Dutch) I have looked at it, the German page is most different. All major pages have a different definition of History. All include the notion that is the past, but whether its description belongs to it is less clear. In general, the articles treat history as a school and scholarly discipline. Wikipedians have no clear opinion whether history is a humanity or a science. Most of the initial pages have a shared ordering in line with the general wikipedia politics., starting with a summary and giving more particulars further down.

As usual on wikipedia, it is unknown who wrote the pages, so they are a collective responsabilitly or token to be common knowledge. But that would remain to be seen, given the large differences between the starting pages in the different wiki language versions. For example, most of the pages say that history is first the (systematic) study of the past, but myself I would tend to agree with the German and Frisian definition that say (in the short Frisian phrase) that 'History is everything that happened in the past of man, and the study of it'. And the second part might even be left out. People without 'a systematic study of history' do have a history and usually also sense of it, as far as I know. If the definition cannot be seen as uncontested, what does this mean for other pieces about history on the Web. Are they usually full of opinions, do they copy from each other (which seems to be the case with the starting pages). That remains to be seen.

Most important pages used:

Geschiedenis (Dutch)
history (English)
histoire (French)
Skiednis (Frisian)
Geschichte (German)
Storia (Italian)
historia (Spanish)