In 2021, the American Historical Association published a study on how the American public perceives and understands the past. Almost half of the respondents argued that they turn to Wikipedia to learn about history and acquire a historical understanding of the past. Wikipedia was ranked higher than other historical activities, such as “Historic site visit,” “Museum visit,” “Genealogy work,” “Social media,” “Podcast/radio program,” “History lecture,” and “History-related video game.” These findings combined with the appropriation of Wikipedia’s corpus by ChatGPT and Wikipedia’s partnership with the most central search engine in the digital world, Google, and other digital assistants, such as Siri and Alexa, make clear how crucial the role of Wikipedia in how the public learns about history and makes sense of the past is.
But how is historical knowledge produced on Wikipedia? How do Wikipedia editors engage with historical events of the past and transform the past into historical knowledge? Why do they decide to contribute to the production of history? By placing Wikipedia editors at the center of research inquiry and using multiple methodologies and different kinds of data, this book explores how historical knowledge is produced in one of the most central digital communities of knowledge, Wikipedia.
In this presentation, Petros Apostolopoulos will analyse how historical knowledge is produced on Wikipedia, the policies and guidelines that enable the Wikipedia system to work, the structures of power and hierarchy within the Wikipedia community, and the reasons why millions of Wikipedia editors decide to spend their time writing and updating historical articles on Wikipedia. Finally, he will discuss Wikipedia’s role in the AI landscape, which has appeared and is changing continuously.
Thursday, 21 November 2024
17.00 - 18.30
Black Box, Maison des Sciences humaines, Belval Campus
and online.
Please register to attend in person or to join online.