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A lesson on Wikipedia as a born-digital source of history and how to apply digital source criticism to it.
The lesson invites historians to adapt their critical approach to Wikipedia as a born-digital source for historical research. More specifically, it suggests ways to apply digital source criticism to Wikipedia’s infrastructure and content and to explore potential uses of Wikipedia for historians. The lesson proposes a short introductory video and a set of five assignments. No specific technical skills are required to complete the assignments, the only requirements being an internet connection and, ideally, knowledge of a second language (in addition to English) to complete the fifth assignment, which is based here on knowledge of English and French but can be adapted to other languages.
The launch of Wikipedia in 2001 sparked discussions and debates among historians and scholars in the humanities and social sciences. Some scholars saw Wikipedia as representing a novel, web-based and crowdsourced model of historical knowledge production beyond traditional academic historical writing based on research expertise and peer review. Those scholars saw Wikipedia as an intellectual opportunity to redefine historical writing and adapt it to the needs and challenges of the digital age. Other scholars criticised Wikipedia for including low-quality and superficial information written by people without any expertise and exploiting free labour to keep its content alive, and for its gender- and race-related disparities in terms of community members and thematic coverage. In spite of these debates, historians now embrace the use of Wikipedia in their research and teaching. This assignment sets out to consider Wikipedia from a historical perspective and demonstrate why it matters for historians.
Wikipedia is a born-digital source that contains historically stimulating information about how Wikipedia users perceive the past, how they interpret it based on the present, and how they transform the past into Wikipedia articles. This information can be extracted both from the main content of Wikipedia and from discussions and debates between Wikipedia users, which take place “behind the scenes” in the “talk pages” of articles. Historians who work with Wikipedia should familiarise themselves with both the specific characteristics of its infrastructure and the policies governing (historical) knowledge production so that they can contextualise the information they retrieve.
Since it was founded, Wikipedia has become a self-regulated community and a public space where people can discuss, create and edit historical articles. The digital structure of Wikipedia, including its policies, guidelines, hierarchy and sub-communities, encourages the dynamic, multilayered participation of its editors and active engagement with the production of historical knowledge. The following sub-assignments investigate Wikipedia’s infrastructure, policies and guidelines, the “talk pages” where Wikipedians take part in discussions and debates about history, edits to Wikipedia articles, and finally the perception of history as a field of knowledge by Wikipedia.
Wikipedia articles include historical narratives about the past. In other words, they tell a story about the past. These stories are the result of collaborative writing between Wikipedia users. Each article has a different structure based on various combinations of standardised sections (e.g. chapters, sections, infoboxes, hyperlinks), including visual and audio elements (e.g. graphs, videos, images, sounds) and bibliographical references. Now that you have a better understanding of how Wikipedia works, let’s look at the historical narrative of a Wikipedia article.
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.
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.
Wikipedia does not exist only in the English language: there are 331 active language editions as of July 2024. The different editions are not just translations from one language to another; they can also propose different narratives. Historical narratives about the past may therefore involve different representations, structures and discussions. The multilingual nature of Wikipedia gives historians a way of comparing historical narratives across different cultural perspectives. In this part, we will compare two different Wikipedia language editions by focusing on an event in French history with a global dimension, May ‘68, as it is represented in the English and French editions of Wikipedia.
You can adapt the proposed exercise to focus on a case study of your choice based on your research interests and in languages you are more comfortable with. Here are some ideas: compare the English and Arabic versions of the article on the Arab Spring, the English and Chinese versions of the article on the Silk Road or the English and German versions of the article on the Berlin Wall.
