wikihistories aims to reshape how history is made on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world and the de facto global reference of knowledge about people, places, events and things. Although Wikipedia’s scope and authorship are larger than any previous encyclopedia, it nonetheless suffers from significant omissions and misrepresentations. Research on Wikipedia’s systemic biases has grown over the past decade, but scholars have not yet systematically addressed either the ways partiality is produced or the platform’s approach to historic events. This project aims to address these two gaps, by critically evaluating Wikipedia’s representation of historic events in Australia. Bringing together experts on Wikipedia politics and public history, the project will map and evaluate Wikipedia’s blind spots in annual Report Cards. Focusing on practices and procedures, it will advance a new conceptual framework for understanding digital knowledge platforms and their inequalities and produce a new analysis of one of the world’s most powerful knowledge platforms at a time when the impacts of media technologies on public values of trust, accuracy and diversity are more apparent than ever.
wikihistories is Heather Ford, Tamson Pietsch, Nathaniel Tkacz, Michael Falk, Kelly Tall, Francesca Sidoti, and our comrades in the wikihistories mailing list