Ksenia Coffman’s fellow editors have called her a vandal and a McCarthyist. She just wants them to stop glorifying fascists—and start citing
Coffman navigates over to the Wikipedia article about one of the conspirators—Arthur Nebe, a high-ranking member of the SS. Apart from his role in the plot, Nebe’s main claim to notability is that he came up with the idea of turning vans into mobile gas chambers by piping in exhaust fumes. The article acknowledges both of these facts, along with the detail that Nebe tested his system on the mentally ill. But it also says that he worked to “reduce the atrocities committed,” going so far as to give his bloodthirsty superiors inflated death totals. Coffman will recall that she feels “totally disoriented.” She cannot believe that an innovator in mass murder would have tried to protect the Jews and other supposed subhumans his troops rounded up. She checks the footnotes. The claim is attributed to War of Extermination, a compendium of academic essays originally published in 1995. Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.” The level of bad faith is eye-opening for Coffman. She is “very appalled.” She sees that her confidence in Wikipedia was “very much misplaced.” All it takes to warp historical memory, she realizes, is something this small, achievable for almost anyone with a keyboard. “So few people can have so much impact, it’s a little scary,” she says. She begins to turn a more critical eye to what she sees on Wikipedia. Especially the footnotes.
Emphasis is my own, because it's just so important.
Exercise a healthy skepticism for everything you read.
This goes for any kind of research, not just in Wikipedia. This happens in all kinds of contexts, purposeful or not.
Look at works cited, look at the original source. Make sure you understand the context of whatever you're looking at, be it a photo, a quote, or excerpt.
It may sound laborious, but honestly like anything else, the more you practice the easier it gets. For places like wikipedia with links in citations, it's even easier to track things down.
A works cited section in a wiki article is a great place to start your research, but your research should never end there.
