How Wikipedia represents Australia: findings from Wikihistories

Which Australian people, places and historic events does Wikipedia tend to represent? What is missing and what explains Wikipedia’s biases? What does it mean to edit Wikipedia about Australian topics today?

In this online seminar, the wikihistories team, hosted by Wikimedia Australia, will highlight findings from the four-year wikihistories project. The project investigated how English Wikipedia represents Australian people, places and historic events.

We will show what we learned about how Wikipedia tends to represent more men than women in Australia. We will also show that you’re more likely to get a Wikipedia page if you’re notable for sports, entertainment or politics than for education, healthcare and other caring labour. We’ll talk about how debates about Australian national identity and history explain missing histories in articles about places. We’ll also look at how differences in interpreting Wikipedia’s rules complicate the practice of editing about Australia.

We’ll discuss our latest findings about the importance of Wikipedia articles about catastrophic bushfires, using a new approach to analysing local reader data. We’ll also look at how new projects in the Wikimedia stable are trying to improve Wikipedia’s coverage in all the world’s languages, with some unintended consequences along the way.

We will outline a theory of systemic bias that places responsibility on the Wikipedia system rather than on individual editors. Finally, we’ll discuss the international environment for critical research about Wikipedia, and how Australians can use Wikipedia to improve their digital literacies.

Presenters
Professor Heather Ford, Dr Francesca Sidoti, Dr Michael Falk, Dr Ivan Smirnov and Jane Curtis, followed by a response from Elliott Bledsoe, President of Wikimedia Australia.

Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, https://ror.org/05mmh0f86 [Discovery Grant, ID DP220100662].