I’ve just joined the expert advisory board for the wikihistories project led by Heather Ford, Tamson Pietsch and Nathaniel Tkacz.

As well as giving input on digital methods and research approaches, I’m also interested in engaging with the project on research into histories and representations of marginalised communities on Wikipedia – and connecting it to work we’ve been doing on East and Southeast Asian communities in the UK and editathons as formats for involving under-represented communities (e.g. through initiatives such as Whose Knowledge and Art+Feminism).

Here’s more about the wikihistories project:

Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites in the world and the de facto global reference of knowledge about people, places, events and things. Although Wikipedia’s scope and authorship are larger than any previous encyclopedia, it nonetheless suffers from significant omissions and misrepresentations. Research on Wikipedia’s systemic biases has grown over the past decade, but scholars have not yet systematically addressed either the ways partiality is produced or the platform’s approach to historic events. This project aims to address these two gaps, by critically evaluating Wikipedia’s representation of historic events with four key objectives:

• Objective 1: Understand how Wikipedia’s partiality has been framed and evaluated.
• Objective 2: Map the scope of entries relating to Australian historic events on Wikipedia in order to analyse who and what is systematically omitted.
• Objective 3: Investigate how Wikipedia’s representations are constructed through practice.
• Objective 4: Develop an international consortium of researchers working to investigate the source of Wikipedia’s inequitable representations around the world.