Wikipedia doesn't set out to play favourites. But when a made-up Melbourne suburb has more history than real Australian places, something is shaping what gets written.

Who - or what - decides which Australian places matter on Wikipedia?

Hosts Heather Ford and Francesca Sidoti go looking, through a map of 35,000 places, a street corner in Penrith, and a fight over one island's name.

How is Wikipedia biased, and why? The answer will surprise you.

Voices

Heather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press.

Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ARC Discovery project ‘Wikipedia and the nation’s story: towards equity in knowledge production’ in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

Dr Michael Falk is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne, and is a computational literary scholar, data scientist, speaker and writer. In all his work, he aims to combine the creativity of the arts with the rigour and precision of data science.

Research links

Australian places and Wikipedia

Map of Australian places on Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025)

Map showing Edit intensity of Australian place articles: English Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025)

Full report: How Australian places are represented on Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025)

We analysed 35,000 Wikipedia entries about Australian places. Some of them sanitise history (The Conversation: 2024)

Erinsborough Wikipedia Page

Penrith Wikipedia page

K'gari Wikipedia page

Bias and Wikipedia

Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past by Roy Rosenzweig (The Journal of American History Volume 2006)

Wikipedia's known unknowns (The Guardian 2009) The earliest geographical analyses of Wikipedia’s geographical biases is described Professor Mark Graham.

‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap ( Social Studies of Science 2017) How Wikipedia’s infrastructure introduces new and less visible sources of gender disparity, by Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman.

Who Gets To Be Notable And Who Doesn't: Gender Bias On Wiki (NPR All Things Considered 2021) On Wikipedia, gender inequality is hiding in plain sight. Of more than a million and a half biographies - that's on the English-language version - fewer than 19% are about women. A recent study by Francesca Tripodi brings some new insight into why that is.

Demographic disparity in Wikipedia coverage: a global perspective (EPJ Data Sci. 2025)Even though people identifying as female and non-binary genders have been better represented in terms of the number of Wikipedia language editions over time, and they are currently better covered than males, current global coverage of people on Wikipedia still shows disparities in both gender and geographical location of biographical subjects in various dimensions.

Wikipedia editors

Who is contributing to Wikimedia projects? (Wikimedia Foundation, nd) The Wikipedia “Change the Stats” page that collates research into the Wikipedia editor base as a baseline for increasing the diversity of Wikipedia editors.

Community Insights Report (Wikimedia Foundation, 2020) A survey with 2500 Wikimedians looking at their demographics, social and technological experiences. Findings from the survey included:

• Wikimedia contributors are 87% male. Almost half live in Europe and one-fifth in Northern America, as compared to 9.7% and 4.8% of the global population.
• Fewer than 1% of Wikipedia’s editor base in the U.S. identify as Black or African American.
• Although women were still markedly underrepresented among contributors, there was a modest increase in women contributors between 2019 (11.5%) and 2020 (15.0%).

Further reading

“Finding Eliza: power and colonial storytelling” by Larissa Behrendt (2016)

“Finding Eliza” exhibition at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery until 16 August 2026

Clips

Jimmy Wales on bias: Lex Fridman podcast 19 June 2023

Comedian Guy Williams on visiting Rottnest Island

Herbs French Letter

World Heritage Fraser Island officially restored to Indigenous name, K'gari, supported by public (ABC News 7 June 2023)

Credits

The executive producer of this series is Heather Ford.

The series is hosted by Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke.

Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate producer is Francesa Sidoti.

Story consultant is Rachael Cusick. Sound by John Jacobs.

Thanks for feedback from Sarah Gilbert, Regina Botros, Celine Teo-Blockey, Siobhan Moylan, Lachlan A Court, Zlata Maltceva, Rosa Ellen, and Kate Lawrence.

All That We Touch artwork by Alexandra Morris. Episode tiles by Jane Curtis.

Bell music composition by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary.

Executive Producer of UTS Impact Studios is Sarah Gilbert.

It’s produced on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia.

wikihistories is supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP220100662, ‘Wikipedia and the Nation’s Story: Towards Equity in Knowledge Production’.

Find out more at wikihistories.net

Transcripts

Wikipedia and Australia: the bias in the map Transcript Word doc

Wikipedia and Australia: the bias in the map Transcript PDF

There's a place in Australia called Erinsborough.

It's a Melbourne suburb. It's got a school, a hospital, a police station and a pub which

was totally destroyed twice.

It exploded from a gas leak and then a fire was deliberately

lit.

And I know all this from a quick search and skim of Wikipedia,

this page about the suburb of Erinsborough.

It's really impressive. It's an essay. Really.

And then there's a street called Ramsay Street, named after the

Ramsay family who moved there in 1985.

Maybe you've heard of it. Maybe. Yes. Erinsborough is the

fictional suburb at the heart of neighbours,

one of Australia's longest running TV soaps.

But here's the thing. Erinsborough, a place that doesn't exist, has more history

on Wikipedia than places that do.

And that got me thinking. So this online encyclopaedia.

It used to be a joke, and it's not anymore.

It's one of the world's ten most visited sites.

Even when you think you're not using it, you probably are.

It's got editions in 362 languages. Messy, intense,

collective, constantly changing in

a way that's kind of awe inspiring. After 25 years, it's

become part of the furniture.

But Wikipedia isn't just something we live with.

It's something we learn from.

And the things we learn from shape us and how we

understand the world.

So we're wondering what shapes Wikipedia.

Welcome to All That We Touch Wikipedia. This

series comes in two halves.

First, what shapes Wikipedia? In this episode, what Wikipedia

says about Australian places and what it

doesn't. Then episodes on Wikipedia's biggest fights and

whether it survives AI.

That's the first half and the second half of the series.

It's about using it better. A quiz where the answer is almost

never entirely true or false.

The question every teacher and student asks can I cite this

thing?

And for Wikipedia editors, how to include First Nations

knowledge the right way?

Hi everyone, I'm Heather Ford. I'm a Professor of Knowledge

Technologies at the University of Technology,

Sydney, and I've had this long interest in Wikipedia.

Since the early 2000s, I've been researching Wikipedia.

I've written a book about Wikipedia, and what's kept me interested is Wikipedia's

promise that it would be the sum of all human knowledge.

And I've been curious. Did it keep its promise?

Hi, I'm Francesca Sidoti, also known as

Fran.

With Heather, I'm part of the Wikihistories team that researches this very interesting

question about how Wikipedia represents Australian people,

places and events. And I'm the 'postdoc' or Postdoctoral Research Associate, which is

like the baby academic of the group.

I am obsessed with place and how place shapes our lives.

So Heather, cheekily, let's start with place because...

Everything in life happens in a place.

And one of the most popular searches on

Wikipedia is places.

So you might be on a holiday or on a road trip and

you look up the places you're travelling through.

You're driving. You're about to stop in

this town.

You might pull up Wikipedia.

What is this place?

How many people live here?

What's its history?

Another scenario. There's breaking news.

Everyone's searching for locations they've never heard of

before.

Where is the Strait of Hormuz?

Exactly? And it's the Wikipedia article that

shows up in Google and AI searches.

Or might even be your Siri result.

Where is the Strait of Hormuz?!

Yes!

Millions of people are learning about that place

from Wikipedia.

It's the go-to platform about places.

And that kind of poses the question, what does

Australia look like on Wikipedia?

Doctor Michael Falk, a chief investigator on the Wiki Histories Project and

also a senior lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne,

did just this thing. I asked Michael to...

Find all the Australian places that are

mentioned in Wikipedia, 35,000 or so of them,

and then put them on a map.

Could you describe that map to us?

So you can see there are some very brightly coloured parts along the east

coast and down in the south west corner,

and then some dark or even just blank parts across most of the

continent.

And one of the big pictures that emerges from that is that some

parts of Australia are extremely written about on Wikipedia.

They're kind of obvious places like Sydney and Melbourne, whereas vast swathes of the

continent are only described by a small number of

articles, which are often very short. Can we see any other

patterns that emerge?

So one thing we tried was looking at the number of times

there are edits on each place,

and this only accentuated the pattern we'd seen.

What's the story? Like what? What is going

on?

When you look at those maps and listeners can get these maps

from the Show Notes and the wikihistories website.

What do you take from it?

If I had to summarise the biggest things we found by looking at all the

Australian places in Wikipedia,

Wikipedia's editors care most about places where people live.

So towns and villages and suburbs and cities and shops and

airports.

The great historian of the internet, Roy Rosenzweig, said

that Wikipedia had a 'whatever centric bias'.

And I think that's completely true. Whatever it is that the editor is interested in is the

most important thing in the world.

And they lavish so much attention on it.

So the editors decide what places get included because they're the ones

volunteering their time to write about them.

The fewer people in a place, the less attention it gets on

Wikipedia.

So what does it mean for the places that are missing on

Wikipedia or barely

covered? Heather.

Why do you think it matters?

Well, I think it matters because Wikipedia is so

central to defining what a place means.

And that has implications for people living in this place.

Like for tourism. Wikipedia isn't just a website.

For most people, it's the front door to knowledge about a place.

If a place isn't on Wikipedia, or if it's just two lines and an outdated

population figure as far as the internet is concerned now and into the

future, that place barely exists.

So the picture of Australia you get through

Wikipedia is real, but it's partial.

It's cut on a bias. It's leaning towards the cities, the coasts,

tourist attractions with large gaps in between.

Bias. It's a word that gets thrown around a lot.

But when I hear it, I think of something you can actually

touch.

I'm a seamstress in my other life, and in sewing, the bias is

a real physical thing you can hold in your hands.

Woven fabric has a grain threads running from top to bottom.

Threads running across along the grain. Fabric is stable, but

there's a third direction,

a diagonal running at 45 degrees across the threads.

That's called the bias. Cut along the bias and something

changes.

The fabric stretches. It drapes. It falls over the curves of a

body.

Instead of hanging stiffly, nothing has been added to the

cloth.

The bias was always there, woven into its structure.

Which brings us back to Wikipedia.

Yes, it's been accused of bias from its very

early days.

And what did the response from Wikipedia look

like?

Okay. Here's co-founder Jimmy Wales.

You know, I think you can always point to specific

entries and talk about specific biases,

but that that's part of the process of Wikipedia.

Anyone can come and challenge and to go on about that.

But, you know, I see fairly often on quite extreme

accusations of bias.

And I think, you know, actually, I just I don't see it.

I don't buy that. And if you ask people for an example, they

normally struggle.

Right from the beginning, Wikipedia has always

acknowledged that there are gaps.

So they talk about bias in terms of 'gaps'.

Yes. And that's really reflected in the logo,

right?

It's like a globe where there's missing pieces of a puzzle that

are being filled in.

And what about the people on the ground editing

Wikipedia?

There were always editors that recognised that

Wikipedia, its editors, the way they did their work,

entailed bias. And there's so much in the press right now

about how Wikipedia is biased.

Is Wikipedia biased against the American right, or is Wikipedia

biased against female scientists?

I mean, kind of amazingly, I think the discourses at the moment are

that Wikipedia is simultaneously biased against the left and the right.

Next, we're going to a place in Australia that does have a Wikipedia page,

because we're wondering when a place is written about in Wikipedia.

What does Wikipedia's Version of a place look like to the people

who actually live there.

So I went to Penrith in outer western

Sydney...

On High Street, which is the main street, asking people about

what Wikipedia was saying about their home.

And why Penrith, Fran?

So Penrith is a place that I know intimately

from going and spending hours at the Penrith Plaza.

Now Westfield, as a teenager where they couldn't kick you

out.

It's also a really interesting place. We didn't want to look

at, say, a city suburb.

We kind of wanted to get a sense of a place where people might be walking out on the street and

happy to give you a bit of time to look at the page and tell you

what they thought about it, and whether it represented the place

they knew so well.

So what would you expect to be on a Wikipedia page about

Penrith?

Penrith Vox Pops: Well, I'd expect the history. It'd be a

bit of the history, how it was settled,

and developed, and what it's like today.

Yeah. Do you want good or bad? Do you know how long I've lived

here for?

I don't know how they're going to really portray Penrith as

something other than it's just a down to earth,

normal Australian town suburb.

Can I just show you the front page of the

Wikipedia article about Penrith?

Do you have any reactions when you look at it?

Penrith Vox Pops: I suppose it just doesn't really grab, so to

speak.

It's just like a pretty bland... European exploration....

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's quite good. They've done a bit of a

layout.

Yeah. Very nice. I'm surprised they haven't, like, put High

Street down.

And what what goes on here? High Street is really iconic.

Like a lot of stuff happens. The lighting of the Christmas tree,

like stuff like that.

I would have thought High Street would definitely be on that.

We've pushed all these homeless people out and then we're trying to make it gentried. And then

we've got empty businesses everywhere because the rent is

horrendous. Would you want to advertise that anywhere?

You'd want it to be positive, wouldn't you? Like I see

'Indigenous settlement', but it's not much,

is it? It's a very short paragraph. I bet you there's

more about the Europeans, isn't there?

Of course there is.... Wow. Wow. No, it's sad to see that there's

only a little paragraph.

And the rest is about European settlement.

People got hurt in that time. I don't understand it.

The page and the place. You can hear it.

They are not the same thing. There was the encyclopaedic

stuff that people expected on the page and got.

And then there were surprises. There's missing information

about places and traditions important to locals.

Shops on High Street.

The page leans positive.

Like they want to show a particular gentrified

version of Penrith.

"I want there to be the Penrith that I know."

Some topics are much more in depth than others.

How little there is about First Nations

history compared to European history in Australia.

The kind of outrage. Very emotive. Yeah.

So this is one article, one place.

But over three years we've looked deeply at a number of Australian places on

Wikipedia and how they're represented.

And in our research, something kept showing

up.

It's something that a New Zealand comedian happened to sum

up really well.

Here's Guy Williams at the 2026 Melbourne Comedy Festival Gala.

And there's a strong language and content warning for the next

minute.

I love this country. It's one of the best

countries in the world per capita behind New Zealand,

you know. But you've always screwed me over like I went to

Perth and there's more to the story than that.

Uh, when you go to Perth, what's the main tourist attraction?

Rottnest. They're like, "You got to go to Rotto!" as soon as you

get off the plane.

They're like, "Go to Rotto!" in pamphlets, advertisements,

"You've got to go to Rotto!

You've got to go to Rotto! It's got beaches, it's got quokkas,

it's got vintage lighthouses." But then you get to Rottnest

and they're just like, "Surprise! It's actually the

site of an Indigenous genocide." Arrgh.

Fucking Australia's fucked me again. Arrgh...

by the way, Australia. Your vintage lighthouses suck shit,

okay?

They're like 150 years old. I've been to Mexico.

They had internet cafes older than

that. Wake up.

So Guy Williams is making a joke, but what he's saying is actually really

central to our research on Wikipedia.

And the pattern we kept seeing had a name.

Even if it's not one Wikipedia would use.

'Colonial' or more precisely, 'neocolonial'.

We found essentially that Wikipedia articles about Australian places

were privileging settler colonial perspectives,

histories, and people's experiences while simultaneously

diminishing settler colonial violence.

So only prioritising certain aspects of white Australian history and really quite a lot

of contestation around the inclusion of First Nations

experiences and peoples and places, place names.

It's about two questions, right, Fran? First,

what is the bias?

And then the second question is why does this bias exist in the

research?

On Wikipedia there's been this connection made between bias and

editors.

So let's take a quick look at who edits and what they do.

Fran, can you tell us how you become an editor

on Wikipedia?

Do you apply? Is there a vetting process?

Age limit? No to all of those. So anyone can edit Wikipedia.

Right now, you could go to an article on wikipedia.org.

In the top right corner of the page, there's a blue text link

that says Edit.

You click 'Edit' and you're inside. You're in the document you are reading a few seconds

before and you can add something,

fix something, click Publish Changes. That is it.

You are an editor.

And if you stick around long enough, you may even

call yourself a 'Wikipedian'.

There are two kinds of editors. The serious ones who stick

around and volunteer intensively.

...And the 'drive-by-nights', the folks who

dip in because they're testing the waters.

A lot of Wikipedians take it seriously, and I think it is radical work,

because who does this anymore,

you know? We have volunteer firefighters and we have

librarians, and we have Wikipedians,

and they're really gathering the threads of our society together

when so much is pulling us apart.

So we know Wikipedia editors live all over

the world.

Almost half of Wikipedia editors are in Europe and a fifth in

North America.

And because of that, 'whatever centric bias' we mentioned, they

work often on articles about stuff they're interested in from

wherever they are.

You've met many Wikipedia editors through the

wikihistories research.

Yes. It's the best part of my job.

So what kinds of people end up editing articles

about places in Australia and what are they motivated by?

Really interesting people and very,

very diverse in their motivations.

So some people edit a Wikipedia page because they love editing

census data.

So the 2020 census is released or whenever it is, and all the new numbers come out and they

just want to go place by place and

update population figures. Some people edit Australian places

because they love copy editing and they find a typo and they

fix that. Some people edit Wikipedia pages because They're

from there and they're very attached to the place.

So you'd assume that people living in Australia

are the ones writing and editing about

Australia, right?

A lot of the time that is the case, but not

always.

Kia ora, I'm Turnagra. I'm a Wikipedia editor based out

of the Whanganui a Tara

Wellington, New Zealand.

And Turnagra is his username on Wikipedia and

what he's asked to be called in the podcast.

Turnagra is the name of an extinct New Zealand songbird.

I've been editing Wikipedia for over 14 years now,

but I only started proper just before Covid.

I'm a fairly generic Kiwi white guy in his mid 20s.

And Turnagra is a pretty generic Wikipedia

editor to.

I mean, research suggests that the majority of Wikipedia editors are white men across a

range of ages who are pretty tech savvy.

So it used to be that research on Wikipedia's biases, said that bias exists

because of the types of people who edit Wikipedia,

and the fact that between 80 and 90% of all Wikipedia editors are

men.

That explains how something like Middle Earth from Lord of the

Rings is very well represented on Wikipedia.

But we're starting to realise that it's not only about the identities of the people who

edit Wikipedia that explains these biases.

And we'll hear how this plays out in a story from

Wikipedia editor Tanagra.

So, how did he become an editor?

Turnagra is interested in New Zealand music,

and that's what got him into Wikipedia.

There's a really iconic song that I was looking

for information on by a local reggae band called Herbs.

The song 'French Letter' that was quite pivotal in our anti-nuclear movement and the

sort of evolving political landscape of the 1980s and New Zealand.

Herbs 'French Letter' song: Can you see yourself under a coconut

tree?

And there just was no Wikipedia article at all.

And so I was like, okay, well, there's all of these sources

around here, and so I need to change that.

And wrote that article about this fairly pivotal song in our

political history that's all captured on Wikipedia.

Being able to contribute to that was quite cool. Yeah.

Turnagra has a deep love of place, including

what places are called on Wikipedia.

Names are very complex on Wikipedia.

Why is that?

Well, the title of the article about a place has to

take the 'common name'.

And the 'common name' is what the majority of reliable sources

call that place.

It is not the official name.

And look, I love the Common Names Policy because I want to call 'The

Gabba', the stadium in Brisbane,

'The Gabba'. But there are some places where the implications of

that are very different.

Yes, so the Gabba. I am new to Australia, but the

Gabba, I'm presuming, is a stadium that is

in colloquial terms called 'The Gabba', but has an official name

that's very different from that?

Yes, its official name is the Brisbane

Cricket Ground, which I have discovered very recently.

Sometimes there are arguments or controversies about which place

names the Wikipedia page should use,

and that argument can be the thing that's interesting or

attractive to some editors.

Actually, when I was getting more into it, it was

actually around these sort of naming disputes.

The page title being the first thing that people see really shapes how people think about it

and what name people know it as.

So one of the first things I did was there's a volcano up in

Auckland called Maungakiekie One Tree Hill,

but it was known on Wikipedia just by its English name of One

Tree Hill.

Whereas common usage elsewhere had it as the full dual name

Maungakiekie/One Tree Hill.

So I put a move in to try and change that name.

When Turnagra says 'move', that's Wikipedia speak

for 'change the name'.

So Turnagra makes the 'move request' to

change the names of these articles.

A Volcano in Auckland... And his requests are approved.

Names are changed. Other editors around the world, they're asking

for name changes to every day,

all the time. So Turnagra logs onto Wikipedia and he goes to

the list of Move Requests or name change requests,

and he sees a name he recognises.

And so I'd been reading through some of those Move Requests, and one of the

requests had moved from Fraser Island to K'gari,

and I'd been there when I was a kid. We'd come over to

Queensland and gone on a trip.

It is indeed a magnificent destination in sunny Queensland, fraser Island,

the world's largest sand island.

Fraser Island is so rich in its striking colours and immense beauty of its beaches and sand

cliffs that it's been World Heritage listed...

Between April and June 23rd, there were four different

requests, which is a very fast rate for Wikipedia articles.

Four different editors, all asking to change

the name of the page 'Fraser Island'.

This wasn't a coincidence. Something

incredibly significant was happening.

Here's Queensland Premier at the time, Annastacia Palaszczuk on

K'gari reported by ABC news.

It's a turning point in our state's history. It

really signifies that we are a progressive,

modern Queensland. The world's largest sand island was named

after Eliza Fraser,

who was shipwrecked here in the 1800s. Historians say her stories about the Aboriginal

people she met led to dispossession and massacres,

making the name 'Fraser Island' a painful reminder.

We fought for this for a long time. Lots of generations have

fought for this.

More than 6000 submissions were received through public

consultation last year.

About 70% were in favour of the change. The Butchulla people say today is not about renaming but

reclaiming their word for the island -

'paradise'. The landmark decision means the name 'Fraser

Island' will be replaced on maps,

road signs and tourist information.

But not on Wikipedia.

So to me, that's like a no-brainer, right?

The Premier has just announced it. It was this huge process.

It's on the news. But this change doesn't automatically

happen on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia doesn't work like that. There has to be consensus among editors to

change the name because the official declaration,

even if it's come on the back of a lengthy democratic, deliberative process, does not

determine the common name.

So Wikipedia's rules mean that editors have to wait until there's enough

sources that are deemed as reliable are calling the thing,

in this case, gurry, in order to change the title.

How many sources, you may ask? How many editors.

You may also ask, how much time should they wait to declare a

common name?

Wikipedia does not tell us. Editors just need to work it out

amongst themselves.

In the heat of this historic moment.

People started talking and just outright saying that there shouldn't be any more talk

about the name of the article for a while,

because it had been happening so frequently. It had a bit of a

chilling effect.

The name stays as Fraser Island on Wikipedia.

So three months pass. Six months pass. A

year passes.

June 2024, which was about a year after the last

major discussion about the articles name.

So I had a bit of a quiet, long weekend here, and I thought I'd

look into it again because I had nothing better to do at the

time. I went through all references to the island in

either news or academic journal articles.

Since the name change in June 2023 and recorded what name the

island was known as or used in that article.

And that was overwhelmingly in favour of 'K'gari'.

It was something like 353 results, of which 317 used the

name K'gari and only six

used Fraser Island by itself. So it was a very clear like this is

unambiguously now known by the name Guti.

And so I put all of that evidence up, based the rationale in the various bits of policy

and guidelines that Wikipedia has.

To some extent. It's almost like you're a lawyer and you're trying to build the case and

you're getting your evidence together,

and then you present your case to the court and you'll have the

jury weighing in and engaging in it.

And then the person at the end comes in and acts as the final

judge and rules based on the strength of each argument.

And that I had assumed, based on how overwhelming the usage was,

would be a fairly uncontroversial discussion,

which clearly was naive. That discussion took about 3 or 4

weeks.

There were quite a few people involved. There were a lot of strong views on both sides and

strong views that would be more at

home in a Facebook comment section like 'this is the

Anglosphere'.

This is how it's always been known. That can feel almost like a personal affront to them if

you're trying to change something that they've known by this name.

It gets personal.

You can have all the evidence you want, but if people

don't like it, they will just oppose it.

So it does vary. And I think that also speaks to just the

fact that it's run by volunteers.

And so everyone has slightly different perspectives on things

in different levels of experience.

So you're never going to get the exact same process twice.

In practice, consensus is really just determined when editors stop

disagreeing with one another.

And a lot of the editors I spoke with had actually increasingly just moved

further and further away from editing those pages because the contention had

become exhausting or frustrating.

It's a slog, and it's something that at a certain

point you're sort of like, well,

what's what's the point in doing this if I'm just spending all my

time arguing with randoms on the internet?

Turnagra points out an interesting paradox about

Wikipedia.

While Wikipedia is constantly changing and is the biggest site

for breaking news...

Wikipedia has a tendency to really strongly

favour the status quo.

But because there is so much inertia in favour of the current

title, it's very difficult to overcome that.

And that means that Wikipedia can quite often sort of lag

behind the rest of contemporary usage.

So one example at the moment is the renaming of Turkey and the

fact that that's still at the name Turkey because usage

is still unclear on what is going to emerge in the long run.

So it tries to take a bit more of a conservative approach until

there's a clear pattern of,

'Okay, this is the name that people are using now.' The

status quo has such power.

At about the end of June 2024, after a month of discussion,

that discussion was finally closed in favour of

the name Gati.

And the name of the Wikipedia page was

finally changed from its former name, Fraser Island,

to its official name, Garry, a full year after its official

name was declared.

And then being able to go and make that change was

like, great.

To be able to actually see that happen and be part of that.

Not all Wikipedians will do this, but there are many among them that

do this incredible work of trying to mediate very polarised positions like

Turnagra did.

And this is very heavy work emotionally.

And it could be dangerous because there are

major threats of harassment.

And it's also incredibly time consuming.

Many would see this as a success. It took a

while, but Wikipedia got the name right in the end.

But others, including editors I interviewed,

see it as an example of Wikipedia's conservatism.

It took a whole year after the announcement where multiple editors

continuously tried to change the name that was preceded by the biggest place

name consultation ever undertaken in Queensland.

Is there a fix to this?

So Wikipedia sees itself as a follower rather than

a leader.

It's an encyclopaedia, not a newspaper, so it needs to follow

what reliable sources are saying in aggregate about a

subject. And I think that's correct. That makes sense for

most places.

But in the context of Australia and other countries with a

painful colonial past,

the weaponization of the common name rule caused harm.

Wikipedians can also change the rules to deal with local

circumstances, and they could do that here.

The biases we've heard about that shape what Australia looks like on Wikipedia, favouring

settler colonial history and urban places.

They're part of the fabric of Wikipedia.

It used to be that bias exists because of the types of people

who edit Wikipedia.

We're starting to realise that it's not only about the

identities of the people who edit Wikipedia,

it's about the rules and about practices, and it's about the

system of Wikipedia that's been built up over time.

And that that actually is a huge barrier to including knowledge

about the world.

Why this happens is this great way of understanding what we can

do better, how we can make it better because we can,

because it's Wikipedia, it's in the hands of the people.

Next time on All That We Touch: Wikipedia.

Wikipedia made a promise to be the sum of all

human knowledge.

It's a big promise. And to keep it or break

it, people have been fighting.

And these fights shape the Wikipedia you

use today.

There's a woman who built French Wikipedia from

scratch with three people.

No rules. And the Wikipedia co-founder who told her what

you're doing is actually quite useless.

Spoiler alert! She disagreed.

There's a fight. About what knowledge counts.

And then the biggest fight of all... To

include or to delete.

Three fights that shape Wikipedia. That's episode

two coming next.

For links, research videos, and episode transcripts, see the

Show Notes in your podcast app.

The Executive Producer of this series is

Heather Ford.

Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate Producer is

Francesca Sidoti.

Story consultant is Rachael Cusick.

Sound by John Jacobs.

Bell music composition by Maxim

Voloshin-Cleary.

Executive producer of UTS Impact Studios

is Sarah Gilbert.

This podcast is made with the support of the

Australian Research Council.

And it's produced on Gadigal Country in

Sydney, Australia.

Find out more at wikihistories.net