[Artemisia] Medieval Technology: Beware the Wiki!

[Dr. C. M. Helm-Clark Ph.D.]

On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 22:54 -0600,
artemisia-request at lists.gallowglass.org wrote:
> For those of you busily working on your 'How things have changed!'
> persona stories, here's a first link to give you some help. You might
> be surprised what was and was not available in your era.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology

Unfortunately, the above article is a good example of the 
downfalls of the Wikipedia.  It contains some significant 
misstatements (like the 3 intro paragraphs) and some bad 
mistakes (e.g., incorrect first western mention of 
compasses; confusion over use of stirrups, saddles and 
lances; incorrect history of spurs; incorrect first 
medieval combined arms tactics; incorrect advent of clout 
shooting with heavy bows; quite confused on history of "cast 
iron" and true blast furnaces; misleading statement on 
history of mirrors; incorrect first mention of magnets; 
misleading history of wheelbarrows).

There are some things that really did change the world that
are missing, like the 12th C. invention of double entry 
accounting in Sienna, the bodkin arrow, the invention of 
true brass, quantitative assay, composited and pattern 
welded steel weapons, the invention of strong acids.

The bibliography is stuffed with secondary and tertiary 
sources, some of which are quite dated and some of which 
are of very dubious value. Good secondary sources based on 
modern archeological finds are extremely thin on the ground.
Standard references, both modern and historical, that I 
would expect to see (e.g. Tylecote, Diehl, Gettins, the 
Mappae, Pliny, Agricola, Kalamazoo proceedings) are 
conspicuous by their absence.  I think the it is also 
telling that despite the presentation of a bibliography, 
many of the entries in the tables are cribbed right out of 
other wikipedia articles.

The wikipedia has some really splendid webpages - and it has
its dogs. I'm afraid this page is one of the dogs. Pages like
this are a bad thing since the presentation that a wiki 
format provides makes even bad material look credible and 
without a specialist's knowledge, bad pages are hard to spot.
I would opine that starting with searches through google 
scholar, museum sites like the V&A and Museum of London and 
even the Britanica would give better results on tracing the 
history of technology.  I am quite wary of the wikipedia 
because a lot of people don't how to spot bad documentation. 
I'm afraid that I spotted several of the mistakes on this wiki 
page only because of my medieval material science addiction 
and my better-than-average access to research materials (JSTOR,
Britanica, INSPEC, Science Direct, stack privileges at two 
university libraries, the librarians of Sentinal's Keep... ;-)

Instead of this wiki page, might I suggest starting with the
medieval technology website at New York University? I think the
different in quality will be immediately apparent from the
treatment of sources.  The NYU site is at:
http://scholar.chem.nyu.edu/tekpages/Technology.html

ttfn,
Therasia