The Wiki-Model vs. the Google-Model

I was a history major in undergrad and I find myself constantly placing historical figures, events, and artifacts into the contexts of time and space in order to get a better understanding of how the individual elements of history fit into a larger whole. That being said, places are often difficult to contextualize because the names of the political demarcations of countries and regions change so frequently. For so long I could never precisely place the region of "Thrace." It's Greek, but not exactly. Is it adjacent to the Black Sea or closer to the Balkans or both? These days there are a number of ways that I can find the answer to this question. A quick look on Wikipedia shows that Thrace includes just a small portion of the northeast of modern-day Greece, is adjacent to the Black Sea, and is no where near the Balkans. But how can I ensure the accuracy of this information? In its early days, any information retrieved from Wikipedia was seen as necessarily suspect. The underlying assumption to these objections was - how could any information entered by "normal people" be taken seriously? In the past few years, however, I don't know that anyone would question the legitimacy of a Wikipedia article regarding the geographical location of the region of Thrace. The surveillance of millions of people over a knowledge-bank seems somehow airtight, especially when juxtaposed with digital curation projects that are more proprietary in nature.

Take Google Books, for example. In a recent article in Digital Humanities Quarterly, the authors give an overview of the history of digital mapping projects. The authors are particularly interested in the ways in which digital mapping projects could assist scholars in the humanities (and particularly the classics) in conducting their research. There are certain hurdles that must be overcome before digital maps can be useful to scholars, and the authors cite an example using the maps feature on Google Books. They looked at J.S. Watson's 1854 translation of Xenophon's Anabasis and found in the "About this Book" section that the "Places mentioned in this book" included some well-known ancient sites like "Syracuse" and "Olympia." If you'll take a look below, you can see where Google decided to place these locations:


A good scholar will realize, of course, that these placements are wildly inaccurate, but would a middle or high-school student writing a paper on Ancient Greece necessarily make that same realization? One can easily see how such a student might simply make the assumption that the Greeks had discovered and colonized North America.

The accuracy of Google's metadata is something we talked about a lot in class last week, and it's a problem that doesn't seem to be going away. Though the article in Digital Humanities Quarterly was published almost a year ago, I checked the "About this Book" section of Xenophon's Anabasis and the same inaccuracies are still present. The question on my mind is, why doesn't Google deal with its metadata issues by opening it up to public scrutiny and correction? The authors of the article have their own project, Pleiades, which will "enable anyone - from university professors to casual students of antiquity - to suggest updates to geographic names, descriptive essays, bibliographic references and geographic coordinates." The authors also note that these updates will be "vetted for accuracy and pertinence." So, why doesn't Google adopt this model? Surely, at this point, they must have considered this option. Is it just that there's nothing it for them financially? Do they not want to put in the time to vet the updates for accuracy and pertinence? It seems that they are going to have to do something about their metadata, otherwise it seems that Google Books is simply going to become irrelevant.