to square with what is there on the page. a close examination of the manifesto undermines the perception the southern politicians were universally blinded by rage. to the contrary, the drafters all -- often advance legal arguments opposing immigration to contain more nuance, subtlety and sophistication in their detractors have allowed. recovering those arguments in detail enables one to understand how the manifesto in significant ways should be viewed as the missing to send to brown v. board of education. announcer: learn more about the 1956 southern manifesto this sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern here on american history tv. wyatt and mcgrady talks about how wikipedia has changed since it was founded in 2001. as the scholars in science program manager, he works with academics to improve site content. this interview was recorded at the annual american historical association meeting in new york

city. host: joining us from our studios in new york, ryan mcgrady. he runs the scholars and scientists program as the manager for wiki education, which means what? guest: i run a program that brings subject matter experts to wikipedia. host: how did wikipedia start out? what is its etymology in genesis? guest: wikipedia is a concept of -- a combination of the concept of wikipedia and if wikipedia. is a software that it uses which is that easy to edit, easy to collaborate text and images software. wiki is not the same of -- same as wikipedia but they merge the two together. it began in 2001 as a project of a more traditional encyclopedia. a drafting is for that

traditional encyclopedia. it kind of took off and got a life of its own. very quickly amassed hundreds of thousands of articles. host: who writes and edits for wikipedia and how do you check to make sure it is 100% accurate? guest: as far as who writes wikipedia, anybody can write wikipedia. you could write wikipedia. i write wikipedia. anybody who decides they want to share and the compilation and sharing of human knowledge. how can you check it? one of the fundamental rules of wikipedia is that everything is verifiable. anything that you read in wikipedia should have been written in another reliable source first. and then it was cited in wikipedia and summarized. if you look at a wikipedia article and then you look at the bottom, all of those little footnotes, those are all sources. you should, in theory, be able to verify anything you read on wikipedia by following those sources. most: and if you are the subject

of one of those wikipedia biographies and the information is blatantly false or wrong, how can you correct it? guest: it is tricky. a lot of people are tempted to go and edit their biographies themselves, which is hairy business because wikipedia has a conflict of interest policy. the idea is you cannot have a neutral encyclopedia if people are writing about themselves. the best thing to do is make a note of it on the top page. a lot of people don't realize that every article on wikipedia has a talk page were people talk about that particular article. if there is something that is problematic written about you, you can go to that top page and leave a message. there are also contacts that are dedicated to remove defamatory information. there are dedicated venues that can help you do that if it's something like an emergency. host: do you have a sense of how

often people go to wikipedia for background information? how many people travel to your site on a regular daily basis? guest: i would be surprised if any of the viewers right now did not go to wikipedia on a pretty regular basis. there is something like 1.5 billion unique devices that visit wikipedia every month. it is where people go to find information about pretty much any topic. that is why our organization is dedicated to trying to make sure it is as good as possible. there is a growing recognition that wikipedia is a source people use. it is where the public learns. theink in academia, it was scourge of professors where students with the siting on wikipedia and relying on it too much and perspective -- and professors took the perspective of get wikipedia out of the classroom and now they are coming around. they are realizing it's not going anywhere. students are using wikipedia. it's where people go for information.

so it should be good. host: explain that transformation. as you point out, many college professors would forbid wikipedia as a primary source for a research topic. why and how is that changing? can you elaborate? guest: we still would not recommend citing wikipedia directly. just like google would not recommend citing any encyclopedia or tertiary source. we recommend using wikipedia as an amazing resource to find a summary of what's out there, and then to follow it to the reliable sources that you can then site. we typically, when we talk to students, we talk about when you go to wikipedia, look for the footnotes at the bottom, go to those footnotes and verify things, and then site those footnotes, not wikipedia. host: let's take a deep dive. you said anyone can provide information on wikipedia, but who are the content creators? who are those editing the material?

give us a sense of who the people are that provide this information that we can find online. guest: wikipedia is an encyclopedia anyone can edit. it's really easy to go on and click the edit button. it's hidden at the top and to just change something in an article. but it's hard to do well. it's hard to jump into an article and make significant changes because there are a lot of policies and guidelines involved. but as far as who writes it, just because everybody can write wikipedia, not everybody does. we find that for a project that is trying to accumulate the sum of all human knowledge, there are a lot of demographics that are not reflected in the population of editors of wikipedia. for example, we find that the average wikipedian is overwhelmingly male.

contributors% of self identify as women. they come from primarily english-speaking countries, primarily the united states, u.k., australia, western europe. it is difficult to say that it is encompassing all of human knowledge. that is another area we are trying to address. these volunteers come from particular places and they write about what they are interested in. because they are volunteers they tend to write about things that a lot of people are interested in. things like sports and video games and certain topics that come from pop culture. meanwhile, topics about other parts of the world that are of interest to other people who don't participate are neglected. there are significant content gaps on wikipedia and that is something we are trying to address as well. host: i notice when someone passes away, almost immediately the date of death is immediately on wikipedia.

who is doing that? guest: again, that is just anybody. there are some people looking for that particular kind of edit to jump in there first and make that change. wikipedia is increasingly really good at covering current events. there are a lot of eyeballs looking and a lot of people processing information as it comes in. being a tertiary source, it does not fall into all of the same issues that the news media comes into. wikipedia should not rely on primary sources, it should wait until things are reported and assess the weight of different sources. if somebody's death is being reported on in a whole bunch of sources, then it's probably reliable. but if only one source is reporting on it, they it should -- then maybe it should not be in there. to answer your question, it could be anybody, including you,

including any of your viewers, if you see that sort of thing or have some reliable sources, then you could go into wikipedia and change it. host: so, a hypothetical, because people say what they want on instagram and twitter, but if you have an ax to grind against john doe and you say he is a serial killer or he is a child rapist, things that are blatantly false and that is posted, how is that person able to correct that? guest: wikipedia tries to be really hypervigilant about biographies of living people. it dates back to an incident that happened years ago, a famous journalists, his linked inon wikipedia to the assassination of jfk, which he had nothing to do it. but it remained in the article for months until somebody pointed out to the journalists and he wrote a scathing op-ed about wikipedia. that led to a special policy on

biographies of living people. by default, we should be erring on the side of keeping the material out. it does make it in, it's usually corrected by the people who are watching recent edits, the regular active wikipedia editors. it's usually corrected pretty quickly. but when it's not, you can go to the top page and fix it on your own by editing the page, or there are special venues all across wikipedia that are dedicated to resolving problematic material about living persons in particular. host: what is your revenue source? those who go to the website often see an ad asking for money. guest: i work for the wiki education foundation, which is a nonprofit separate from wikipedia. those go to the media foundation that is an organization operates the servers and the programs that kind of run wikipedia.

we are a separate one, we interface with academia. we believe academia and wikipedia belonged together. so our whole organization is based on bringing wikipedia into classrooms and then dried on the -- drawing on the knowledge that is available in universities to improve those content gaps that i talk about. the topics that are not as good as they should be on wikipedia. host: i grew up reading the encyclopaedia britannica, i guess those days are long gone. guest: they are still around. stopped their print version but it's hard to compete with wikipedia. it's a free resource, it's huge, it changes what it means to be an encyclopedia. host: what is the future of the program? guest: the future of the program that i run, the scholars and scientist program, is to continue to partner with academic associations and universities, archives, libraries to find people who can

bring the subject matter expertise to wikipedia. the encyclopedia that is edited by volunteers has done an amazing amount of good work, but there are some topics that really benefit from having a broad understanding of the literature on a particular topic. for example, what i am talking about at the aha conference is a partnership with the national archive where they are running an exhibit on the centennial of the 19th amendment of women getting the right to vote in the united states. and they came to us and we worked together to recruit a bunch of academics, archivist and librarians to improve wikipedia's topics. because when people go to their exhibit and want to learn more about women's suffrage, they will then go to wikipedia and try to find more information on the 19th amendment and key figures. we worked with these people over six course is an improved a

-- courses an improved a whole lot of articles. created a lot of biographies about suffrages that did not exist on wikipedia before. and really took on the 19th amendment article. i think it isut very much improved. that is what i am talking about. i hope to do more of that partnership and that kind of focused engagement. we know that subject matter experts are understanding. there has been a change in the way the academics view wikipedia and they tend to be viewing it as something they know they should be involved with in some way. to share their knowledge, their passion of people or dedicated their lives to a particular subject and it only makes sense that they shared on wikipedia. they find that while it is easy to get started, it's hard to do well. that is why we have this structured professional development program that walks people through how to do wikipedia, how to share that

knowledge on wikipedia, how to adapt to a different form of writing in a way that makes sense. we take time, we meet with them virtually and through chat. and that is our intervention in this regard to try to make it so that more subject matter experts feel comfortable contributing. host: before we let you go, what is your own background and why did you decide to take on this project? guest: i have been a wikipedia volunteer since 2007. i started as a bollinger editor -- a volunteer editor and researcher of wikipedia. then while a phd student i started teaching classes and brought wikipedia in my classes. that is what led me to this organization, the wiki education foundation. because this is exactly what they were doing. i found it to be a really powerful way to engage students

rather than writing a term paper that gets thrown away at the end of the semester, they write a wikipedia article that they can then show their friends because everybody uses wikipedia. and it persists after the course. they learn digital literacy, information literacy, writing skills. i was passionate about that and it led me to the foundation. meanwhile, every time we go in try to recruit for the student program academics will keep asking us, this is great that you have the structure to help students write, what about something for us? it's from that idea that there is a demand from subject matter experts for some sort of support system. that is why we started shifting and that's why i was passionate about piloting that program. that was two years ago and has been growing ever since. host: ryan mcgrady, the manager of the scholars and scientists program at wiki education joining us from new york. thank you for being with us. guest: pleasure to be here. this is american

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