Many people use Wikipedia to learn about history. However, few of them probably know that Wikipedia articles are the product of lengthy debates, conflicts, collaborations, discussions and consensus between different Wikipedia editors. Wikipedia’s open approach provides us the opportunity to look “behind the scenes” and explore how the articles take shape and change over time. The “talk page” and “view history” reveal discussions between users about each entry, logs of all the changes and copies of older versions of the article. Both tabs include significant data for historical research. As Wikipedia users get involved with creating and editing articles, they participate in discussions and debates, providing useful data about how Wikipedians perceive the past, what historical arguments they make, how they try to reach a consensus, etc. The “view history” tab also contains data on how the historical narrative of a Wikipedia article changes over time. In this part of the lesson, we will investigate what happens “behind the scenes” of a Wikipedia article by exploring both the discussions between the users and the edit history of an article. To do so we will focus on one case study, the article on the September 11 attacks from the English edition of Wikipedia.
You can adapt the proposed exercise to focus on an article about a historical event, person or phenomenon of your choice, in a language you are more comfortable with. Examples include the Haitian revolution, the Arab Spring, the Silk Road, Cleopatra, feminism and slavery, but there are countless others to choose from. Please note that in this case some of the questions proposed below that are specific to the September 11 attacks may not be relevant.
The September 11 attacks were a traumatic event that shaped modern United States history and also had a broader global impact. If you click on the article’s “talk page” tab, you will notice that the discussions are extensive. I have selected some examples which give an insight into how Wikipedia users perceive the past and get involved in debates with other users about how to edit a Wikipedia article. The examples below include discussions on how Wikipedians should honour the memory of victims, how they should describe the people who caused the attacks, what title they should give the Wikipedia article, etc. So please click on the links below and read only the sections mentioned in the titles. For more information on “talk pages” and how to use them, see the video in assignment 2.b.
Then try to answer the following questions:
The ways historians interrogate and write about the past can change over time. One of the foundations of historical research is to establish the state of the art of historiography on a given topic, examine its evolution and determine where it stands at the current moment. Wikipedia narratives change too, and historians need to assess them critically. Now let’s see how the Wikipedia article about the September 11 attacks has changed since its creation.
Please click on the two links below, which contain the most recent edits to the article and the editors who made those changes.
Revision history page 1 – estimated reading time: 8 minutes
Revision history page 2 – estimated reading time: 7 minutes
While you read the pages, please pay attention to:
For more information on how to use the “view history” portal, please watch the video in assignment 2.b.
After reading the above extracts, try to answer the following questions, even though our sample is small (only two pages from a very extensive revision history):
Apostolopoulos, Petros. 2024. Producing and Debating History. Historical Knowledge on Wikipedia. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg. Available open access at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111069586 (Chapters 2 & 3)
Ford, Heather. Writing the Revolution. Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: MIT Press, 2022. (Chapters 2, 3 & 4)
Niederer, Sabine and José van Dijck. “Wisdom of the Crowd or technicity of the content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system.” New media & Society 12(8) (2010): 1368-1387. A copy of the article is available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249689493_Wisdom_of_the_Crowd_or_Technicity_of_Content_Wikipedia_as_a_Sociotechnical_System
Pentzold, Christian. “Fixing the floating gap: The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia as a global memory place.” Memory Studies 2, no. 2 (May 2009): 255-272. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698008102055 Available at: https://christianpentzold.de/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Memory-Studies-Pentzold.pdf