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How Australian places are represented on Wikipedia

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posted on 2025-06-04, 02:44 authored by Heather Ford, Francesca SidotiFrancesca Sidoti, Michael Falk, Tamson Pietsch, Tom Byers
“How Australian places are represented on Wikipedia” analyses Wikipedia portrayals of Australian places, how these are produced, and their implications.

Funding

Wikipedia and the nation’s story: Towards equity in knowledge production : Australian Research Council | DP220100662

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University of Technology, Sydney

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University of Technology, Sydney

Research statement

Background Wikipedia studies is an interdisciplinary field that has explored how Wikipedia editors collaborate to produce Wikipedia as a free, public knowledge good. Some have examined how Wikipedia is biased (towards men and Global Minority countries). Few have tried to understand how bias is produced on Wikipedia. Contribution The wikihistories research team studied how Wikipedia represents Australian people, places and events. The project innovatively combined computational quantitative analysis of 35,000 articles and 14 qualitative interviews – the first interviews with Australian Wikipedians. Novel findings presented in the report include demonstrating how partiality is produced on the platform, not solely locating bias. It finds that English Wikipedia reflects an anthropocentric and neo-colonial image of Australia as a place. This image arises from Wikipedia policies and platform affordances, editor practices, and the understandings of space and place that underpin the platform. Significance The research was funded by an ARC Discovery grant. It discovered that issues of national identity are debated and, sometimes, settled on Wikipedia. This is significant because of Wikipedia’s pivotal role in the digital knowledge ecosystem including AI, where it acts as a crucial data source. 'The Conversation' article about the report was the website headline story of the day (read 13,300 times) and the title story in The Conversation’s newsletter (194,000 subscribers). The researchers were interviewed by the ABC, Cosmos Magazine, ACS Information Age, InnovationAus.com, and Phys.org, with articles republished through MSN and Yahoo News. This coverage resulted in 16,100 views. The research featured in the Wikipedia newsletter, The Signpost, on 6/11/24 and was described as “outstanding”. Wikimedia Australia shared it in their newsletter and invited the researchers to present to the board. It was nominated for the 2024 Wikimedia Foundation Research of the Year award.

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