Wikipedia Needs You!
Dustin Wax recently posted to Savage Minds musing ‘What do they want from us?’ They, of course, are the hoi polloi, and us are the anthropological cognoscenti. He lists a number of good points, and then ends in a joke: ‘They want to know about the dinosaurs.’
I’ve got to say, I think that highlights a key problem with the whole question: Most of them don’t know what they want from us, ’cause they’ve got no idea what we have to offer. (For those of y’all not in the know, there’s a fairly common misconception that anthropologists do palaeontology. For my part, what I used to get most often in college was ‘You study bugs?’)
Now, a lot of the blogs in the anthropologosphere aim to address just this issue: helping to develop an anthropologically-informed public. But the truth of the matter is that we are an Internet ghetto: Even our best and brightest blogs are infrequently visited by those outside of our limited circle.
Luckily, there are other ways to reach out: Witness, Wikipedia. Wikipedia is one of the best general information resources on the Web — it is a user-edited on-line encyclopaedia which, despite its apparent susceptibility to fraud, is remarkably useful. For a great many of its articles, you won’t find essays of comparable quality in print encyclopedias.
Sadly, Wikipedia is sorely inadequate when it comes to presenting anthropologists, anthropological theories, or ethnographic information. I’ve recently added entries for Ruth Behar and Pierre Clastres (both still in progress), and am working on a survey of Asante history, but there’s a lot of anthropology that should be on Wikipedia but isn’t. So, come on, folks: Dig up your favourite anthropologist from your grad school days, and get writing! Your Internet needs you.