The Big Encyclopedia: How does Wikipedia see Australia?
Holding a hallowed place at the top of search engine results, Wikipedia has become a profound influence on the information age.
With articles written and edited by millions of volunteers around the world, it’s been hailed as “the last best place on the Internet”, and is often the first port of call for anyone learning about a new topic.
But its wide editorship and readership does not render it free from bias. A new study shows that Wikipedia articles about Australian places fall into some predictable patterns.
“My big motivation for doing the study is to encourage the public to understand how to read Wikipedia better,” Dr Heather Ford, lead researcher and an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, tells Cosmos.
“Every single source that we encounter – before the internet, and definitely on the internet – is biased in some way. It is coming from a particular perspective.
“People come to platforms like Wikipedia, and those that synthesise Wikipedia data like Google and ChatGPT, and think that it is somehow neutral, because it is somehow an objective consensus view of everyone’s knowledge or views on a topic – but that’s just not true.”
The report is the second in a 3-part Australian Research Council Discovery project on Wikipedia and Australia, called wikihistories. Last year, the team published a report on how Australian people are represented, and next year they will be focussing on Australian events.
In this study, the team mapped and analysed 35,077 English Wikipedia articles about Australian places. Then they examined 3 articles in detail (Katoomba, Tasmania, and Australia), interviewing 14 editors who had worked on the articles, and looking closely at what they did and didn’t cover.
While anyone can edit Wikipedia, meaning editors can come from anywhere, all 14 of the interviewees were Australian.
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