Last semester, while teaching STS 200 “Topics in Science and Technology Studies,” to primarily engineering students at Penn State, I found something peculiar. Students complained — some a little, some a lot — that I was asking them test questions whose answers were not to be found on-line and, in particular, on Wikipedia’s STS page.

Is anyone satisfied with Wikipedia’s STS page? I don’t even see the terms “ICT” or “infrastructure.” What is to be done with this Wikipedia page?

Now, I realize that the “core” of STS is a running problem in the field, as there is no center to speak of or fully shared history. This is obvious in many ways, but there is one that I have routinely found of interest: upper-level undergraduate and lower-level graduate texts which introduce “history and philosophy of science,” “Science, Technology, and Society,” and “Science and Technology Studies.” Such texts rarely cover the same material in a way that sociology introductory texts contain a good deal of similar information.

I use Sismondo’s and Volti’s introductory texts and their books contain concerns not reflected in Wikipedia site such as “ghost publishing” or the “political economy of knowledge.”