April: How Australian places are represented on Wikipedia
Monday 14 April
2pm to 3pm
Online via Zoom
30 minute presentation & 30 minute open discussion
With Michael Falk, Heather Ford and Francesca Sidoti
In 2024, the wikihistories team set out to understand how well Wikipedia represents Australian places and what kinds of editing practices drive those representations.
Examining 35,000 articles about Australian places and interviewing volunteer editors, we found that English Wikipedia reflects an anthropocentric and neo-colonial image of Australia as a place.
English Wikipedia’s representation of Australian places is anthropocentric. The further you move from the cities, the fewer articles there are. Across Australia’s arid centre, there are very few articles indeed. Not only are there more articles about Australia’s large cities on English Wikipedia, but editors devote considerably more attention to them.
In this seminar, Michael Falk will present the quantitiative aspects of the report, including the hexmaps that summarise our main findings. Heather Ford and Francesca Sidoti will also be present to address the qualitative aspects of the research.
HADES is group of Humanities and Diverse eResearch Scholars based at UoM united around inclusive, diverse and ethical approaches to digital research in HASS fields, and the crucial link between teaching and research.
Suggested pre-reading:
https://wikihistories.github.io/reports/2024
https://wikihistories.github.io/reports/2024.pdf