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The Twelve-Volume History of the Iraq War Wikipedia Entry

by Matthew Zuras on September 7, 2010 at 03:50 PM

Iraq war wikipedia edits
James Bridle has compiled the editing history of the Iraq War Wikipedia entry from December 2004 and November 2009 into a twelve-volume collection "the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia." With relevant and irrelevant additions, defacements and debates, Bridle presents not the history of the war, but the way in which we remember it. "This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification."

The collection is made up of the 12,000 changes since the article's birth, totaling almost 7,000 printed pages. This process of creating history is vital for Bridle, who sees Wikipedia as "not only a resource for collating all human knowledge, but a framework for understanding how that knowledge came to be and to be understood; what was allowed to stand and what was not; what we agree on, and what we cannot" -- even when "someone erases the whole thing and just writes 'Saddam Hussein was a d**khead'."

Tags: books, historiography, history, IraqWar, IraqWarWikipedia, JamesBridle, top, wikipedia

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