What’s missing from Wikipedia’s history of Australia?

Wikipedia is an icon of the internet age, not just because it is the world’s largest encyclopedia and the de facto global reference of knowledge about people, places, events and things.

Also, its non-profit user-contributed model has remained intact over 21 years, almost a last vestige of the ideal of non-commercial collaboration and information sharing on the internet.

However, its standing as a trusted source is not without question, with evidence of systemic bias against women, minorities and Indigenous knowledges, according to researchers undertaking a major study of how Wikipedia presents Australian history.

Led by the Head of Discipline for Digital and Social Media in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Associate Professor Heather Ford, the Australian Research Council-funded project will explore how Australian history is written about on Wikipedia, potential limitations or biases in the ways that history is represented and how to improve it to make it more representative.

“Wikipedia is the 5th most visited site in Australia, with 244 million page views last month and more than 227,000 Australian-related articles in English Wikipedia alone,” Associate Professor Ford said.

“Our project will make a major contribution to understanding the ways in which the events that shaped modern Australia are represented on Wikipedia and therefore Wikipedia’s impact on public knowledge in Australia.

Although the Wikimedia Foundation has been conscious of finding content gaps and filling them, there is more than that to making the platform more equitable.

Associate Professor Heather Ford

“In putting Wikipedia’s Australian history-related content under the microscope we have the support of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Australia, who value research on improving the platform’s performance and practice.”

The research team will include Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch, Director of the UTS Centre for Public History, and UK-based Australian scholar Nathaniel Tkacz, University of Warwick Reader and author of Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness.

“Although the Wikimedia Foundation has been conscious of finding content gaps and filling them, there is more than that to making the platform more equitable,” Associate Professor Ford said.

“Aside from a culture dominated by a largely male community of volunteer editors focused on the Global North, there are significant barriers to participation by underrepresented groups in the way the editing software works and the complex set of rules they must negotiate. Right now the bar is just too high for minority groups to contribute.

“We hope that as a result of this project the Australian Wikipedia community will have greater understanding of what’s missing in the representation of Australian history and how they might mitigate against some of the barriers to editing Wikipedia by underrepresented groups.”

The three-year Discovery Project, Wikipedia and the nation’s story: Towards equity in knowledge production, has been awarded more than $400,000 by the Australian Research Council.