Wikipedia's future challenges

How Wikipedia portrays Australia’s people, events and places, and what gets included or deleted, is a battleground fuelled by conflicting rules and editorial culture wars, new research shows.

Wikipedia is one of the world’s most visited websites, shaping how billions of people access and share information online. It is also a major source for training AI tools such as ChatGPT.

“It's become absolutely critical public knowledge infrastructure,” said Professor Heather Ford, an Australia Research Council Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communications at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

Professor Ford discussed her research at a recent SXSW Sydney panel discussion together with President of Wikimedia Australia Elliott Bledsoe, author and journalist Richard Cooke, and moderator Sarah Gilbert from the UTS Centre for Social Justice and Inclusion.

Professor Ford is leading a three-year study, funded by the Australia Research Council, into how Wikipedia represents Australia.

“We've looked at 35,000 articles about Australian places to try and figure out what Wikipedia does well, and what it doesn't do well. We also interviewed 14 editors of Australian Wikipedia articles,” said Professor Ford.

“We're very interested in controversy, because controversial articles are those where there's a decision being made, multiple decisions being made. We asked editors, what were controversial issues?

The study found that issues around culture, colonisation and First Nations place names were particularly controversial on Wikipedia.

“The thing that every editor mentioned was First Nations place names. First Nations place names are incredibly controversial on Wikipedia. What we found when we dug a bit deeper is only 6% of Australian places have an associated First Nations place name,” said Professor Ford.

She described a year-long edit war over the naming of the island K'gari (formerly Fraser Island), which was officially renamed in 2023 by the Queensland government, and the challenges editors faced due to conflicting rules about common names and reliable sources.

Mr Bledsoe noted that contributors tend to be from particular demographic groups, and that Wikimedia Australia supports local communities and encourages contributions from underrepresented groups, such as women and First Nations people.

“In terms of who makes up editing communities, we don't know for certain, but we do know that there's definitely what you might term a global North (American) kind of slant. There is also definitely a predominance of generally white, middle-class males.

“One of the things we're doing with Wikimedia Australia is thinking about how we carefully approach the issue of First Nations knowledge systems…

“If communities want their knowledge in that space, we need to do a lot more to make that appropriate and work for those communities, but also, it's okay for us not to be where all knowledge lives,” he said.

Mr Cook, who has a forthcoming book on Wikipedia's social history, described the cultural and structural problems that make it difficult for non-Western editors to contribute to Wikipedia.

However, he also described the site as one of the few online spaces that is getting better, as others get worse.

“Wikipedia is going to be the last human written encyclopaedia. There's never going to be another one…This is the end of an encyclopaedic age. It's the end of an encyclopaedic way of thinking about things,” he said.