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Volume 16

Producing Historical Knowledge on Wikipedia

Petros Apostolopoulos
North Carolina State University

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 Producing Historical Knowledge on
Wikipedia
Petros Apostolopoulos
North Carolina State University

In the late 1990s, the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0
technologies brought many changes in the way people produce
historical knowledge and have access to it.1 The first generation of
the World Wide Web was dominated by static websites and
facilitated by search engines, which only allowed information-
seeking behavior. People were limited to the public viewing of
content. The second generation of the World Wide Web, as
Melissa Terras writes, saw the development of online platforms
which allowed and encouraged two-way dialog, and fostered
public participation, the co-creation of knowledge, and
community-building.2 Both professional historians and amateurs
constructed many web sites and blogs, some of which became
popular. History and the knowledge about the past became
accessible and usable to anyone who had access to the Internet.
Various key brands controlled these new opportunities and
attempted to devolve programming and content power to the user.
Some striking examples are Google, Wikipedia, Facebook and
YouTube.3 These popular digital spaces alter the ways in which
historical knowledge is gathered, produced, and disseminated.4 At
the same time, they involve much more than a simple transmission

1
I would like to thank Professor Tammy Gordon for reading the paper and
providing me with insightful comments.
2
Melissa Terras, “Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities,” in A New
Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and
John Unsworth (Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2016), 420-421.
3
Jerome de Groot, Consuming History. Historians and heritage in
contemporary popular culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 90.
4
Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), 189, Mark
Poster, “Manifesto for a history of the media,” in Manifestos for History, ed.
Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow (London and New York:
Routledge, 2007), 40.
of historical knowledge. These digital spaces encourage creative
engagement with the past, as users are not just passive consumers
of histories produced by others, but take active role in using and
understanding the past.5 Web users engage, discuss, use, and
interpret the past, and through this process, they produce historical
knowledge. As Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig wrote in 2006,
“the number of authors of history web pages is likely greater than
the number of authors of history books.”6
The aim of this study is to examine one of these digital
spaces, Wikipedia, and demonstrate how it establishes a public and
digital space, where users produce historical knowledge following
specific guidelines and methods. Wikipedia is an online
encyclopedia founded by Jimmy Wales in 2001; its main concept
is that anyone can edit any page at any time.7 This concept gave
Wikipedia the opportunity to function as a public space for
personal reflection. Wikipedia provides this opportunity through
the “talk” portal, which makes public the discussions and debates
between Wikipedia users about some contested points. The “talk”
portal shows the stages that the creation of a Wikipedia page
follows and the users’ involvement in this process.8
This article intends to show how Wikipedia’s methods and
tools can constitute an exemplar for digital public history projects
in the future. Both the methods and guidelines that Wikipedia
establishes for the selection and production of historical knowledge
can inspire the creation of new digital public history projects, in
which history will not be consumed passively, but it will be

5
Regarding the participation of people in the popular historical activities, see:
Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past. Popular Uses of
History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
6
Daniel Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering,
Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (Philadelphia: Philadelphia
University Press, 2006), 150.
7
Andrew Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution. How a bunch of Nobodies Created the
World’s Greatest Encyclopedia (London: Hyperion ebook, 2009), 14.
8
The talk pages are “administration pages where editors can discuss
improvements to articles or other Wikipedia pages,” see: “Help: Using talk
pages,” accessed May 31, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_talk_pages.
produced actively by the public. This study explores the current
historiography on Wikipedia underlining the lack of research on
users’ involvement, analyzes the guidelines and tools that
Wikipedia uses to produce historical knowledge, and demonstrates
how specific Wikipedia pages (related to history) were created by
different Wikipedia users. A good understanding of Wikipedia can
show how history is consumed and produced in the public and
digital sphere and provide historians with useful tools to do
history.

A Historiographical Overview of Wikipedia

The foundation of Wikipedia and the new methods of
collection, production, and dissemination of knowledge that it
introduced, piqued the interest of many academics, who were
curious to study this new encyclopedia. Many works were
published in order to analyze this digital source of knowledge. The
most significant works fall into the following categories. Studies
that focus on: 1. the accuracy of Wikipedia, 2. the history of
Wikipedia, and 3. the participation practices and open character of
Wikipedia.
Regarding the first category, one of the first and most important
studies on Wikipedia, is the article of the historian Roy
Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the
Future of the Past” (2006), which examines the accuracy of
Wikipedia in U.S. history and the way that Wikipedia presents the
historical events.9 According to this study, Wikipedia accurately
reports names, dates, and events in U.S. history and most of the
factual errors made are small and inconsequential. These results
did not differ much from Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia and the
Encyclopedia Britannica, which also contain mistakes.
Nevertheless, Rosenzweig’s critique is that “good historical
writing requires not just factual accuracy but also a command of
the scholarly literature, persuasive analysis and interpretations, and

9
Roy Rosenzweig, “Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of
the Past”, The Journal of American History 93 (2006):117-146.
clear and engaging prose”.10 The contribution of this study was
very important, as it showed that despite the fact that the historical
knowledge is produced by amateurs and non-professionals on
Wikipedia, its accuracy in names, dates, and events is comparable
to that of other encyclopedias. Moreover, the work, Writing
History in the Digital Age, edited by Jack Dougherty and Kristen
Nawrotzki, examines different perspectives on Wikipedia.11
Specifically, regarding the use of Wikipedia in education, the
chapter by Martha Saxton, Wikipedia and Women’s History: A
Classroom Experience, studies the representation of women in the
online encyclopedia and shows how students should deal with this
source of knowledge.12 The chapter by Amanda Seligman,
Teaching Wikipedia without Apologies, demonstrates how
Wikipedia can teach students to think about authority, authorship,
and argument in tertiary sources.13 In the same book, Shawn
Graham describes the way that an article of Wikipedia can be
improved, in order to show students how historians can create
“signal” in the “noise” of the Internet, using digital media tools.14
Over time, additional studies focused on the history of
Wikipedia and its methods. The work of Andrew Lih, The
Wikipedia Revolution. How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the
World’s Greatest Encyclopedia was published in 2009 and

10
Ibid.
11
Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki, Writing History in the Digital Age,
(Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2013), accessed June 16, 2017,
http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/crowdsourcing/wolff-2012-spring/.
12
Martha Saxton, “Wikipedia and Women’s History: A Classroom Experience,”
in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki
(Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2013), accessed June 16, 2017,
http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/crowdsourcing/wolff-2012-spring/.
13
Amanda Seligman, “Teaching Wikipedia without Apologies,” in Writing
History in the Digital Age, ed. Jack Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki
(Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2013), accessed June 16, 2017,
http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/crowdsourcing/wolff-2012-spring/.
14
Shawn Graham, “The Wikiblitz: A Wikipedia Editing Assignment in a First-
Year Undergraduate Class,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed. Jack
Dougherty and Kristen Nawrotzki (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2013),
accessed June 16, 2017, http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/crowdsourcing/wolff-
2012-spring/.
constituted the first popular history of Wikipedia.15 The work
ranges from short biographies of Jimmy Wales and other
Wikipedia founders to different important events in Wikipedia’s
history. Moreover, more general works such as the study of Peter
Burke, A Social History of Knowledge. From the Encyclopedie to
Wikipedia, analyze Wikipedia as an online encyclopedia and the
methods of knowledge production and dissemination Wikipedia
follows.16 In his work, Consuming History. Historians and
heritage in contemporary popular culture, Jerome de Groot
examines how society consumes history and how this consumption
can help us to understand history and its representation in popular
cultures. Jerome de Groot analyzes the foundation of Wikipedia in
the context of networked interfaces with information and shows
how this knowledge is represented in this digital encyclopedia.17
The Ph.D. dissertation of Despoina Valatsou, The emergence of
new sites of memory on the internet, studies diverse kinds of
“memory websites” where historical content and information are
produced not only by professional historians, but increasingly by
public audience. Valatsou examines Wikipedia as a site of memory
and analyzes its different guidelines.18
Regarding the third category, a number of works examine
the participation, open character, and more generally, the
community of Wikipedia. Specifically, the work of Dariusz
Jemielniak, Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia
examines active participation within the Wikipedia community.19

15
Andrew Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution. How a bunch of Nobodies Created the
World’s Greatest Encyclopedia (London: Hyperion ebook, 2009).
16
Peter Burke, A Social History of knowledge. From the Encyclopedie to
Wikipedia (Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press, 2012), 273-274.
17
Jerome de Groot, Consuming History. Historians and heritage in
contemporary popular culture, 93-98.
18
Despoina Valatsou, Ανάδυση νέων μνημονικών τόπων στο διαδίκτυο (PhD
diss., National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 2014), accessed June 10,
2017,
http://repository.edulll.gr/edulll/retrieve/9398/3034_1.77_%CE%94%CE%94_7
_10_14.pdf.
19
Dariusz Jemielniak, Common Knowledge? An Ethnography of Wikipedia
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).
Jemielniak seeks to produce an ethnography of Wikipedia,
revealing that it is not entirely at the mercy of the public.
Wikipedia balances open access and users’ power with a set of
traditional organizational forms. The work of Nathaniel Tkacz,
Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness places Wikipedia’s open
character in a long lineage of political-philosophical thought.20 The
article by Noriko Hara, Pnina Shachaf, and Khe Foon Hew offers a
cross-cultural analysis of Wikipedia as a community of users.21
The authors make a comparative examination of typical behaviors
on the discussion pages of Wikipedia across different languages.
Joseph Reagle introduces in his study, Good Faith Collaboration:
The Culture of Wikipedia, the concept of “stigmergy” to examine
the community of Wikipedia.22 According to this term, the
collaborative production of knowledge on Wikipedia is not just
based on the communication of the users but on the previous work
done and on the “good faith” collaboration.23
These works provide a useful context for the present paper,
but their combined nature also reveals the lack of work on users’
involvement in the production of historical knowledge. Both the
engagement of people with the production of historical knowledge
and the opportunity that everyone has to write their own opinions
about the page constitute important aspects that are marginalized
or neglected by the above mentioned studies. This is significant, if
we consider that the main feature of Wikipedia is the
“amateurization” of knowledge as the British historian Peter Burke
has argued.24 This means that Wikipedia has to be examined as a
public space, which allows people to come in contact with the past,
to produce it and to discuss it.

20
Nathaniel Tkacz, Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
21
N. Hara, P. Shachaf, K. Hew, “Cross cultural analysis of the Wikipedia
community,” Journal of the American Society of Information Science and
Technology 61 (2010): 2097-2108.
22
Joseph Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia
(Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2010).
23
Ibid.
24
Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, 273.
Guidelines and the policy of Wikipedia
In 2003, the constant growth of Wikipedia and the lack of
funding led Jimmy Wales to establish the non-profit Wikimedia
Foundation.25 The aim of the foundation was to oversee Wikipedia
and its other projects (Wikibooks, Wikinews, Wikispecies,
Wikidata).26 The establishment of the Wikimedia Foundation gave
a more formal structure to Wikipedia, which formulated its own
policies and guidelines.27
Specifically, Wikipedia published the five fundamental
principles, which determine the way it gathers and produces
knowledge. Firstly, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, which means
that it contains the characteristics of encyclopedias, almanacs and
gazetteers. As Wikipedia writes, it is not “a soapbox, an
advertising platform, a vanity press, an experiment in anarchy or
democracy, an indiscriminate collection of information, or a web
directory.”28 Secondly, Wikipedia pages are written from a
“neutral point of view,” so historical knowledge should be
objective and impartial.29 This can be achieved if the Wikipedia
articles are verifiable, accurate, and cite reliable, and authoritative
sources, especially when the project is controversial or is on living
persons.30 Therefore, personal opinions, experiences, and
interpretations do not belong to Wikipedia31 The third principle is
that the content is free and “anyone can use, edit and distribute.”32
Nevertheless, users have to “respect copyright laws, and never
plagiarize from sources.”33 The fourth pillar is that Wikipedia

25
“Wikimedia Foundation,” accessed January 20, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation#History.
26
Ibid., Fethi Erinç Salor, Sum of all knowledge: Wikipedia and the encyclopedic
urge (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2012), 98.
27
Ibid., 99.
28
“Wikipedia: Five Pillars,” accessed January 20, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars.
29
Ibid.
30
Ibid.
31
Ibid.
32
Ibid.
33
Ibid.
users, and especially the editors should have a good
communication, treat each other with respect and civility, and
never “disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate point.”34 The last principle is
that Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but their content and
interpretations can evolve over time.35 As Wikipedia writes, “the
principles and spirit matter more than literal wording, and
sometimes improving Wikipedia requires making exceptions. Be
bold but not reckless in updating articles.”36
In addition to these five pillars, Wikipedia has established
three principal core content policies: Neutral Point of View
(NPOV), Verifiability and No Original Research.37 Wikipedia
argues that these principles complement each other, so they should
not be interpreted separately.38 These policies determine the type
and the quality of material that is acceptable in Wikipedia articles.
It is obvious that NPOV is regarded by the Wikipedia as very
significant, as it is mentioned twice, both as pillar and as a core
content policy.39 The principle of NPOV is that history should be
produced with objectivity. As the historian Herman Paul argues in
his article about the virtues and skills of “being a historian” that
objectivity in the discipline of history was connected with the
detachment of historians’ feelings, opinions and biases.40
Objectivity has traditionally been regarded as a virtue for the
historians and as a sine qua non for epistemic success.41 The policy
of NPOV is connected with the policy of No Original Research,
which does not allow Wikipedia users to include personal opinions
and articles should not be products of primary research. No
Original Research is defined by Wikipedia as “any analysis or
synthesis of published material that serves to reach or imply a

34
Ibid.
35
Ibid.
36
Ibid.
37
“Wikipedia: Core Content Policies.”
38
Ibid.
39
E. Salor, Sum of all knowledge, 101.
40
Herman Paul, “What is a scholarly persona? Ten theses on virtues skills, and
desires,” History and Theory 53 (2014): 361.
41
Ibid.
conclusion not stated by the sources.” 42 This means that research
on Wikipedia has to be based on secondary sources, which are
known and widely accepted. This kind of research is the opposite
of academic historical research, which is based on primary sources
and on original research. It is worth mentioning that this policy is
not applied to the talk section of Wikipedia pages.43
Moreover, the sources have to be verifiable and published.
The policy of Verifiability means that “people using the
encyclopedia can check that the information comes from a reliable
source.”44 The guideline of verifiability is very important for the
perception of history in this community, as verifiability replaces
the concept of truth.45 Marshall Poe suggests an interesting
definition of the truth on Wikipedia:
The power of the community to decide, of course, asks us to
reexamine what we mean when we say that something is
“true.” We tend to think of truth as something that resides in
the world. […] But Wikipedia suggests a different theory of
truth. Just think about the way we learn what words mean.
Generally speaking, we do so by listening to other people
(our parents, first). Since we want to communicate with them
(after all, they feed us), we use the words in the same way
they do. Wikipedia says judgments of truth and falsehood
work the same way. The community decides that two plus
two equals four the same way it decides what an apple is: by
consensus. Yes, that means that if the community changes its
minds and decides that two plus two equals five, then two
plus two does equal five. The community isn’t likely to do
such an absurd or useless thing, but it has the ability.46

42
“Wikipedia: No original research,” accessed January 20, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research.
43
E. Salor, Sum of all knowledge, 101.
44
“Wikipedia: Verifiability,” accessed January 20, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability.
45
Despoina Valatsou, Ανάδυση νέων μνημονικών τόπων στο διαδίκτυο, 105.
46
Marshall Poe, “The Hive,” The Atlantic, September 1, 2006, accessed July 4,
2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/09/the-
hive/305118/?single.
 Wikipedia includes a catalogue of sources regarded as
reliable.47 Wikipedia suggests the users writing history articles
should use easily accessible published scholarly sources from
academic presses. They can use specialized encyclopedias on
historical topics, which are edited by experts, and “memoirs and
oral histories that specialists consult with caution, for they are
filled with stories that people wish to remember—and usually
recall without going back to the original documentation.”48 On the
other hand, Wikipedia points out that the users should not get
history from novels, films, TV shows, or tour guides at various
sites, as “they are full of rumor and gossip and false or exaggerated
tales and tend to present rosy-colored histories in which the well-
known names are portrayed heroically.”49 Therefore, despite the
fact that Wikipedia is a digital encyclopedia, its reliability and,
more specifically, the reliability of the historical articles is based
on printed academic sources that may or may not be available
online. This means that Wikipedia does not seek a distinction
between the online and the monographic narrative, but it develops
a dialogue between these two forms and, thus, enriches both the
kind of printed encyclopedias and other related digital spaces.50
James Purdy considers the way that Wikipedia articles are
created as paradigmatic method for the conduct of academic
research and writing. He argues that this method is based on four
characteristics: study, dialogue, reconsideration and exchange,
which constitute the basis of academic work.51 The process of
studying constitutes the research and verifiability of the sources.
The dialogue has to do with the arguments expressed by Wikipedia

47
“Wikipedia:Reliable source examples,” accessed July 4, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_source_examples#History.
48
Ibid.
49
Ibid.
50
Regarding the dialogue between the old and the new (online) narrative, see:
Chiel van den Akker, “History as Dialogue. On Online Narrativity,” BMGN-
Low Countries Historical Review 128 (2013): 103-117.
51
James Purdy, “Wikipedia is good for you!?” in Writing Spaces: Readings on
Writing, ed. Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky (Indiana: Parlor Press, 2010),
205-224.
users that take part in the creation of a page. The reconsideration
has to do with the community reflection on how an article will be
edited and how the sources will be used in the article. Lastly, the
exchange signifies the way Wikipedia users share their knowledge,
concerns, worries, and their interpretations on a topic.52
As shown above, Wikipedia provides the users the
opportunity to discuss issues on the talk page portal before
committing to editing the article itself.53 Specifically, according to
Wikipedia, talk pages, which are also known as discussion pages,
are “administration pages where editors can discuss improvements
to articles or other Wikipedia pages.”54 Wikipedia argues that
“article talk pages should not be used by editors as platforms for
their personal views on a subject” but they have to aim to the
discussion and communication between the users and mainly to the
improvement of encyclopedia.55 Wikipedia provides guidelines for
use of talk pages: 1. Communicate, 2. Stay on topic, 3. No meta-
discussions, 3. Be positive, 4. Stay objective, 5. Deal with facts, 6.
Share material, 7. Discuss edits, 8. Make proposals.56 Practices
considered unacceptable in the talk pages include: 1. Personal
attacks (insults, personal threats, legal threats, posting other
editors’ personal details), 2. Misinterpretation of other editors, 3.
Asking for personal details from other editors, 4. Attempting to
impersonate another editor, 5. Claiming to be an administrator, 6.
Use of the talk page as a forum.57 When these guidelines are not
followed, the users is blocked or banned from editing Wikipedia.58
Therefore, Wikipedia maintains that talk pages are not forums, so
personal opinions, which are not related to the improvement of the

52
Ibid.
53
E. Salor, Sum of all knowledge, 104.
54
“Help: Using talk pages,” accessed May 31, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Using_talk_pages.
55
“Wikipedia: Talk page guidelines,” accessed May 31, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_page_guidelines.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Ibid.
article, will be removed or refactored.59 However, as we will see in
the next section, the talk pages are used by many users as places to
express personal opinions about the past and to make historical
connections between the past and the present.
Wikipedia operates based on specific guidelines and
principles, which do not allow the expression of personal views on
the pages but only collaboration and communication between
users. According to Wikipedia’s guidelines, personal experience
and interpretation do not belong in the online encyclopedia and
contributions to the production of knowledge have to be neutral,
verifiable, and not the product of original research.

Crowdsourcing and Hypertextuality on Wikipedia

Two important tools for the production of historical
knowledge on Wikipedia are authorship and hypertexuality, which
are formed by both the Internet world and Wikipedia guidelines.
As shown above, the main concept of Wikipedia is that
authors are drawn from a crowdsourcing process. Wikipedia uses
an open call to attract a crowd of people, who will contribute to
writing and editing articles.60 The concept of crowdsourcing
appeared first in an article published in Wired magazine in 2006
that explained how businesses were beginning to outsource work
to individuals.61 A few weeks after the articles was published, the
term was being used by many websites, such as Wikipedia, Flickr,
Project Gutenberg, etc.62 As Melissa Terras argues, in all these
projects crowdsourcing uses the available communications
networks to distribute tasks amongst large numbers of interested
individuals, working towards a common goal.63 According to
Daren Brabham, the use of crowdsourcing can solve two types of

59
“Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not,” accessed May 31, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_not#FORUM.
60
Despoina Valatsou, “Crowdsourcing digital history online,” Historein 14
(2014): 30.
61
Jeff Howe, “The rise of crowdsourcing,” Wired, June 1, 2006, accessed
November 5, 2018, https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds/.
62
Terras, Crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities, 421.
63
Ibid., 422.
problems: information management issues and ideation problems.
Information management issues occur where information needs to
be assembled, selected, created, sorted, and analyzed. Wikipedia
users find the sources, select which they will use, they analyze
them, and then produce historical knowledge. Ideation problems
occur where creative solutions need to be proposed, that are either
empirically true, or a matter of taste or market support.64
Wikipedia using this tool deals with both the lack of financial
resources and experts, and creates a self-regulating community
capable of constructing historical narratives.65
The Wikipedia community includes both registered and
unregistered editors; however, most of them are registered. All
editors are welcome to contribute, but first they have to verify their
sources and edit them according to the community’s guidelines.
Therefore, the editor becomes one of the several editors of a single
edit. Each edit is recorded individually and classified by the day
and time, when the edit was saved along with the username of the
editor or the I.P. address of the unregistered editor. 66 Anyone who
respects the carefully drawn up guidelines can make or alter an
entry. At the same time, the origins of an entry can be
reconstructed at any time by anybody.67 Thus, crowdsourcing
creates a space where a large group of people collectively discuss,
interpret, and describe the past participating in a public production
of historical knowledge68
This self-shared authority on Wikipedia creates a different
perspective in the relation between reader and text. Wikipedia uses
hyperlinks to facilitate exploration of the topic. Hyperlinks are

64
Daren Brabham, Crowdsourcing, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2013).
65
Fien Danniau, “Public History in a Digital Context. Back to the Future or
Back to Basics?,” BMGN – Low Countries Historical Review 128-4 (2013): 130-
131.
66
E. Salor, Sum of all knowledge, 145.
67
Danniau, “Public History in a Digital Context,” 130.
68
Trevor Owens, Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: The Objectives Are Upside
Down, accessed March 10, 2012,
http://www.trevorowens.org/2012/03/crowdsourcing-cultural-heritage-the-
objectives-are-upside-down/.
references to other texts that the reader can directly follow either
by clicking, tapping or hovering. Hypertextuality, the existence of
hyperlinks in the text, is one of the fundamental concepts of the
Internet and defines the structure of the digital text. As Fien
Danniau argues hypertextuality “ensures that we can criss-cross
from one online item to another and in this way are liberated from
a fixed linear narrative. The Internet is so constructed that there is
not center and no periphery, only the point of departure of the
use.”69 Hypertexts allow Wikipedia users to move easily between
different historical events, figures, concepts, from long-term to
short-term, micro to macro levels and so on.
Wikipedia has contents that include the following
categories: Reference, Culture, Geography, Health, History,
Mathematics, Nature, People, Philosophy, Religion, Society, and
Technology.70 These categories, which have the form of a
hyperlink, contain other sub-categories. If we jump into the
category of History on Wikipedia, we will notice that a definition
of history pops up.
History is divided into the following subcategories: history
by region, history by continent, list of time periods, history by
subject.71 These subcategories have the form of hyperlinks, so
users can jump from one page to another. However, the majority of
users do not use the categories links on Wikipedia, but they search
through general search engines, such as Google or through
Wikipedia’s search function.72 As Chiel van den Akker mentions,
in the age of new media readers are driven mainly by the impulse
of curiosity and not by the historical sublime, which characterized
the historicist view of the past.73 As Akker argues, the historical

69
Danniau, “Public History in a Digital Context,” 126.
70
“Portal:Contents,” accessed July 1, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Contents.
71
Ibid.
72
E. Salor, Sum of all knowledge, 155.
73
Chiel van den Akker, “Antiquarianism and Historical Consciousness in the
New Media Age,” in Sensitive Pasts. Questioning Heritage in Education, ed.
Carla van Boxtel, Maria Grever and Stephan Klein (New York, Oxford:
Berghahn, 2016), 65.
sublime was the schock felt by the public about a “distant,
separate, and different past, a past that had been and was not
longer,” but people had to draw lessons from it.74 The feeling of
curiosity signifies a more personal and interactive way for the
public to explore the past, to navigate its different aspects for the
satisfaction of their personal interests. Wikipedia offers this
opportunity through the use of hyperlinks. This digital form of text
works as linked building blocks that are meaningful in themselves
and “make room for association and personal paths of readers.”75
Wikipedia produces a system of knowledge whose
complexity and interconnectedness are based on the iterations of
hyperlinks rather than on all-encompassing system imposed from
the beginning by the editor-in-chief.76 Hyperlinks connect readers
to relevant parts of the analysis from different directions with
different purposes.77 In this way, Wikipedia opens a new mode of
digital and public storytelling, as personal associations with the
past are generated through the awareness of the text produced from
below and the interactivity of the hyperlinks, which immerse the
readers, users, and viewers in the story world.78

Repairing the past on Wikipedia79

Among its guidelines and policies, Wikipedia creates a
space where the users get the opportunity to intervene and discuss
how the past should be represented. Many philosophers of history
have studied the relation between history and justice and there are

74
Ibid., 62. Regarding the historical sublime, see: Frank Ankersmit, Sublime
Historical Experience (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2005).
75
Peter Haber, Digital Past. Geschichtswissenschaft im Digitalen Zeitalter
(München: Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011), 119, cited in Chiel van den Akker,
“History as Dialogue. On Online Narrativity,” 112.
76
E. Salor, Sum of all knowledge, 157.
77
On the role of hyperlinks and their meaning for historians, see: Edward Ayers,
“The Pasts and Futures of Digital History,” History News 56/4 (2001): 8.
78
Ann Rigney, “When the monograph is no longer the medium: Historical
narrative in the online age,” History and Theory 49 (2010):109.
79
Part of this section has been published in Petros Apostolopoulos, “The
affective historical knowledge practices on Wikipedia,” ERIS VU Journal for
Humanities (2018): 21-34.
many opposing statements about this topic. Two important
philosophers of history, Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin
have examined the specific topic and have developed different
positions. Friedrich Nietzsche argues in his book, On the Uses and
Disadvantages of History for Life, that humankind has to stop
hoping for justice and must learn to forget, in order to be able to
live.80 He writes: “Here it become clear how necessary it is to
mankind to have, beside the monumental and antiquarian modes of
regarding the past, a third mode, the critical: and this, too, in the
service of life. […] It requires a great deal of strength to be able to
live and to forget the extent to which to live and to be unjust is one
and the same thing.”81 On the other hand, the philosopher, Walter
Benjamin, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” argues that
there is “a secret agreement between past generations and the
present one”, which is that “like every generation that preceded us,
we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power” to redress
the injustices of a catastrophic past.82 For Walter Benjamin, “[…]
only a redeemed mankind received the fullness of its past – which
is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past been citable in
all its moments.”83
These positions on history and justice formulated by F.
Nietzsche and W. Benjamin express two different views on the
presence/absence of the past and on the way that people have to
deal with it. Berber Bevernage questions this dichotomy and
suggests the Jacques Derrida’s concept of spectral time as a better
concept. Spectral times overcomes the dichotomy of present/absent
past and offers a better concept to understand the way that people
haunt pasts.84 The concept of specters is related to the Derrida’s

80
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in
Nietzsche: Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57-124.
81
Ibid., 75-76.
82
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benjamin.
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), 254.
83
Ibid., 254.
84
Berber Bevernage, “Time, Presence, and Historical Injustice,” History and
theory of the “trace”, which cannot be determined in the simplicity
of a present.85 In contrast, specters are “out of joint”, as they
include parts coming from both the past and the future.86
Following this concept, this section detects these specters of the
past in the Wikipedia discussion pages and also discerns the
responses of the users to these specters through the users’
participation in the production of historical knowledge.
In the article on the Great Depression on Wikipedia, one
chapter of the page is about the “Role of women and household
economics”.87 The section refers to the impact of the Great
Depression on women showing that they did not have a stable
family income, so they had to work harder and to deal with food,
clothes and medical care. There are many details about the
strategies that women followed in order to deal with these
problems.88 This chapter caused a significant dispute between the
users regarding the suitability of this section in the specific page.
In the talk page of the entry the unregistered user
“DrVentureWasRight” writes about the section: “This section
seems to be really out of place. We don’t really talk about the
effects of any specific group or subgroup. I really read [sic] like
someone copied it out of a high school research paper. I
recommend removing it from this page, although it might find a
place on one of the country specific Great Depression page.”89
This suggestion triggered the anger of an editor of the page
“Rjensen”. This user is registered, and, as we can see in his page

Theory 47 (2008): 152. For the concept of spectral time, see: Jacques Derrida,
Specters of Marx. The state of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New
International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).
85
Berber Bevernage, “Time, Presence, and Historical Injustice,” 162.
86
Ibid.
87
“Great Depression,” accessed November 30, 2018,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression.
88
Ibid.
89
“Talk:Great Depression,” accessed November 30, 2018,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Great_Depression#Determining_the_start_of
_the_Great_Depression89 “Great Depression.”
89
Ibid.
89
“Talk:Great Depression.”
on Wikipedia, is an active historian and a Research Professor at
Montana State University, with a PhD from Yale University in
1966, author of many books, articles and papers on American
political, social, military, and economic history, and has been
working on the editorial boards of academic journals such as the
Journal of American History and the American Journal of
Sociology.90 “Rjensen” also has many “barnstars”, which are a
reward to contributors “for hard work and due diligence."91
Furthermore, “Rjensen” is awarded with “The Mary
Wollstonecraft Award”, which is awarded to editors, who have
helped “improve the coverage of women writers and their work on
Wikipedia through content contributions, outreach, community
changes and related actions.”92 “Rjensen’s” response seems very
angry and he writes: “Who is this “we” that does not want to talk
about women? Obviously some narrow economist who is unaware
of the wealth of reliable sources on the great depression.” 93 He
continues his argument pointing out that the job market of this
period was stratified by gender. Moreover, the user suggests a
reference to the impacts of the Great Depression not only on
women, but also on men, and poor people citing a relevant
bibliography on these topics.94 “DrVentureWasRight” intervenes
again in the discussion and writes: “We is [sic] the Wikipedia
community. Now, I didn't say we shouldn't talk about women. I
said that it was totally out of place in this article. We could have a
section on the effects of various groups in the depression, but I
suspect that would be highly dependent upon country and culture.
We could also branch it off in to its own page entirely. That could
work, but there really isn't enough material here to make a good

90
“User:Rjensen,” accessed November 30, 2018,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rjensen.
91
“Wikipedia:Barnstars,” accessed November 30, 2018,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Barnstars.
92
Ibid. See also for “Template:Mary Wollstonecraft Award,” accessed
November 30, 2018,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Mary_Wollstonecraft_Award.
93
“Talk:Great Depression.”
94
Ibid.
page. If you're interested in adding in more detail then making a
page like 'Effects on Women in the Great Depression' could work
well.”95 “Rjensen” closes the discussion arguing that his statement
about the women and the Great Depression is based on reliable
sources, as the Wikipedia editors are obliged to do. “Rjensen”
points out that “the material is from an advance scholarly study”.
In this way, both users disagree about which aspects of the Great
Depression have to be represented in the related page.
Nevertheless, the citation of published sources on the topic by
“Rjensen” will close the discussion, as according to Wikipedia
guidelines all the articles should be based on reliable, published
source.96 At the same time, the fact that “Rjensen” is a user with
many contributions and “barnstars” will make its arguments
stronger and more convincing. Thus, the specific section will not
be removed.
The sources that are used in an article often become a
matter of disagreement between the users. In the page about the
Great Depression, the use of the collected works of Joseph Stalin
in the section on the effects of the Depression in the Soviet Union
is cause for discussion, and many users express their opinion.97
The user “Sagecandor” detects the specific source and wonders if
this primary source is reliable for Wikipedia or it would be better
to use a secondary source.98 As shown above, this claim is based
on Wikipedia policy that the primary sources that are used on
Wikipedia, have to be published.99 More users become involved in
the discussion, question the value of the source, and eventually
decide to remove the specific link. However, careful analysis of the
discussion highlights that users disagree both about the personality
of Stalin and the reliability of his writings. The user “Rjensen”

95
Ibid.
96
Regarding the policy of the reliable source, see: “Wikipedia:Identifying
reliable sources,” accessed June 1, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources.
97
For the source, see: “Collected Works Volume 14,” accessed June 1, 2017,
https://archive.org/details/CollecdWorksVolume14.
98
“Talk:Great Depression.”
99
“Wikipedia:No original research.”
argues that “Stalin faked a lot of numbers”.100 He cites studies in
order to prove his argument, mentioning quotes from these works,
including: “there is no person in authority, from Stalin down, who
would not sign a hundred pages of false statistics and think nothing
of it.”101 The user “Crossswords” disagrees, writing that “the
Soviet Union wasn’t effected by the global financial crisis and
under his lead the Soviet Union became an industrialized nation
this is common knowledge that you can find everywhere in the
west.”102 The discussion will close again with “Rjensen’s”
statement that “even the Russians today agree Stalin faked a lot of
numbers.”103 Thus, Wikipedia users are engaging in the discussion
portal about the Great Depression and expressing their opinions on
how the page have to represented [sic].
In talk pages, history seems fragmentary and not
homogenous, it does not place the diverse human experiences of
the past within one context.104 History takes different forms and
seems to reverse the claim of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
that “history is always written from the sedentary point of view
and in the name of unitary State apparatus, at least a possible one,
even when the topic is nomads.”105 In Wikipedia talk pages,
history does not unify but creates a space for antagonism,
pluralism and fragmentation, where users deal with the past and
feel that they can correct it through their interventions.
The Wikipedia community does not wait to forget, to drop
a historical event into oblivion through historical distance and to
visit the traces of the past after a long time in order to arrogate and
redeem the historical past through the narrative. On Wikipedia the
historical distance from the past is contracted, the historical time as

100
“Talk:Great Depression.”
101
Ibid.
102
Ibid.
103
Ibid.
104
Berber Bevernage, “Time, Presence, and Historical Injustice,” 158.
105
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MS and London: University of Minnesota Press,
1987), 23, cited in Jerome de Groot, “Changing the Game: Public History and
the Space of Fiction,” International Public History (2018): 2.
a notion is compressed and the past touches the present. We can
detect this statement in the page of Cyclone Nargis. This disaster
took place in the Republic of the Union of Myanmar during May
2008 and caused 138,000 fatalities. The cyclone occurred on May
2nd and the related page on Wikipedia was created at the same day.
Nevertheless, Wikipedia users express their concerns about the
page in the talk section of the article and mention that the page has
to be updated with more information. The user, “Cyclonebiskit”,
which is involved in the writing of Wikipedia pages related to
natural disasters, argues that “it is really hard to get information
now, the disaster is in some ways still around, but if you watch
almost any news station, or read almost any paper, you will find
nothing on the storm. There are only online sources for
information.”106 An unregistered user responds with a personal
view on Cyclone Nargis and states that it is a “sad fact” that the
only people who know about the disaster are dead and cannot talk.
The user criticizes the people, who offer information about the
disaster in order to earn money. It seems pessimistic in the way
that the page will be updated in the future, as the people who
experienced the cyclone and could be a valuable source of
information, are dead.107 As shown above, traumatic events such as
cyclones or important events in the modern US history such as the
Great Depression cannot only be present or absent; they are
productive, haunts people’s life, and defines their present and
future.
Wikipedia seems to reverse the belief of many historians
that “Truth is the daughter of Time.”108 Wikipedia users do not
believe that as the years pass, we come to see events more
accurately and observe their impacts with greater detachment. In
contrast, the proper representation of a historical event on

106
“Talk:Cyclone Nargis,” accessed June 10, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Cyclone_Nargis. Regarding the profile of the
user “Cyclonebiskit”, see: “User:Cyclonebiskit,” accessed June 10, 2017,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cyclonebiskit.
107
Ibid.
108
Mark Salber Philips, “Rethinking Historical Distance from Doctrine to
Heuristic,” History and Theory 50 (2011): 12.
Wikipedia is based on the evaluation of the Wikipedia community,
and not on the chronological distance from the past. Wikipedia
users express their feelings and opinions about the past; they are
trying to administer justice in the past and even more to prevent the
past from falling into oblivion. In this way, Wikipedia users make
sense of history and interpret the past in order to understand the
present and expect the future.109 Memory is very important in the
way that Wikipedia users are trying to codify the past and to share
their reflections on it. Memory works as a door of the user to
experience, feel and correct the past and to transform it into a
meaningful and sense-bearing part of the present.110 At the same
time, Wikipedia does not serve only as a site of memory, as the
Wikipedia users are trying to verify their opinions selecting and
citing external sources and other data, which can attribute validity
to their reflections. This need for intervention in the production of
historical knowledge, especially when it has to do with a contested
or traumatic past, is felt and experienced as an obligation. This
duty makes Wikipedia users feel that the sequence of historical
time is not irreversible, but it can be reversible and revocable
through their interventions. On Wikipedia there is not a historical
past that can stand separate from its production and consumption
by the users.

Conclusion
In 2013, Fien Danniau published the article, “Public
History in a Digital Context. Back to the Future or Back to
Basics?,” where she analyzed the current digital public history
projects, and showed the weaknesses that some of them had in both
attracting the public and constructing historical narratives. 111 She

109
Jörn Rüsen, “What does “Making sense of history” mean?” in Meaning &
Representation in History, ed. Jörn Rüsen (New York and Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2008), 3.
110
Ibid.
111
Danniau, “Public History in a Digital Context,” 118-144, Regarding the
incapability of digital public history projects to construct a historical narrative,
see: Pedro Telles da Silveira, “From Instant History to the Infinite Archive:
Digital Archiving, Memory and the Practical Past at the Roy Rosenzweig Center
suggests Wikipedia as an exemplar for public historians in order to
override these problems and design better digital public history
projects in the future.112 This idea shows how important is the
research on Wikipedia for public and digital historians, not only to
prove its accuracy in historical facts, and its eligibility for use in
classrooms, but to use its techniques and methods in new public
digital history projects. Wikipedia’s capability of producing
historical narratives, its self-critical character through the talk
pages, and its open character are significant tools that should not
be underestimated. The popularity of Wikipedia and, particularly,
the popularity of the historical pages that are visited daily by a lot
of people have to be studied and not be neglected as a kind of not
“real history.” Wikipedia cannot change radically the historical
scholarship but can bring the historian closer to the society.

for History and New Media,” Historein, 17/2 (2018), accessed December 5,
2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/historein.10964.
112
Danniau, “Public History in a Digital Context,” 118-144.