Heather Ford 00:00:02
There's a place in Australia called Erinsborough.

Heather Ford 00:00:05
It's a Melbourne suburb. It's got a school, a hospital, a police station and a pub which

Heather Ford 00:00:13
was totally destroyed twice.

Heather Ford 00:00:16
It exploded from a gas leak and then a fire was deliberately

Heather Ford 00:00:20
lit.

Heather Ford 00:00:21
And I know all this from a quick search and skim of Wikipedia,

Heather Ford 00:00:25
this page about the suburb of Erinsborough.

Heather Ford 00:00:28
It's really impressive. It's an essay. Really.

Heather Ford 00:00:32
And then there's a street called Ramsay Street, named after the

Heather Ford 00:00:37
Ramsay family who moved there in 1985.

Heather Ford 00:00:41
Maybe you've heard of it. Maybe. Yes. Erinsborough is the

Heather Ford 00:00:45
fictional suburb at the heart of neighbours,

Heather Ford 00:00:50
one of Australia's longest running TV soaps.

Heather Ford 00:00:54
But here's the thing. Erinsborough, a place that doesn't exist, has more history

Heather Ford 00:01:01
on Wikipedia than places that do.

Heather Ford 00:01:04
And that got me thinking. So this online encyclopaedia.

Heather Ford 00:01:11
It used to be a joke, and it's not anymore.

Heather Ford 00:01:14
It's one of the world's ten most visited sites.

Heather Ford 00:01:17
Even when you think you're not using it, you probably are.

Heather Ford 00:01:20
It's got editions in 362 languages. Messy, intense,

Heather Ford 00:01:26
collective, constantly changing in

Heather Ford 00:01:30
a way that's kind of awe inspiring. After 25 years, it's

Heather Ford 00:01:35
become part of the furniture.

Heather Ford 00:01:39
But Wikipedia isn't just something we live with.

Francesca Sidoti 00:01:43
It's something we learn from.

Heather Ford 00:01:45
And the things we learn from shape us and how we

Heather Ford 00:01:48
understand the world.

Francesca Sidoti 00:01:49
So we're wondering what shapes Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:01:54
Welcome to All That We Touch Wikipedia. This

Heather Ford 00:01:59
series comes in two halves.

Heather Ford 00:02:02
First, what shapes Wikipedia? In this episode, what Wikipedia

Heather Ford 00:02:08
says about Australian places and what it

Heather Ford 00:02:12
doesn't. Then episodes on Wikipedia's biggest fights and

Heather Ford 00:02:17
whether it survives AI.

Heather Ford 00:02:19
That's the first half and the second half of the series.

Heather Ford 00:02:23
It's about using it better. A quiz where the answer is almost

Heather Ford 00:02:28
never entirely true or false.

Heather Ford 00:02:31
The question every teacher and student asks can I cite this

Heather Ford 00:02:36
thing?

Heather Ford 00:02:37
And for Wikipedia editors, how to include First Nations

Heather Ford 00:02:41
knowledge the right way?

Heather Ford 00:02:47
Hi everyone, I'm Heather Ford. I'm a Professor of Knowledge

Heather Ford 00:02:51
Technologies at the University of Technology,

Heather Ford 00:02:53
Sydney, and I've had this long interest in Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:02:58
Since the early 2000s, I've been researching Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:03:02
I've written a book about Wikipedia, and what's kept me interested is Wikipedia's

Heather Ford 00:03:07
promise that it would be the sum of all human knowledge.

Heather Ford 00:03:12
And I've been curious. Did it keep its promise?

Francesca Sidoti 00:03:16
Hi, I'm Francesca Sidoti, also known as

Francesca Sidoti 00:03:18
Fran.

Francesca Sidoti 00:03:19
With Heather, I'm part of the Wikihistories team that researches this very interesting

Francesca Sidoti 00:03:24
question about how Wikipedia represents Australian people,

Francesca Sidoti 00:03:27
places and events. And I'm the 'postdoc' or Postdoctoral Research Associate, which is

Francesca Sidoti 00:03:33
like the baby academic of the group.

Francesca Sidoti 00:03:36
I am obsessed with place and how place shapes our lives.

Francesca Sidoti 00:03:41
So Heather, cheekily, let's start with place because...

Heather Ford 00:03:46
Everything in life happens in a place.

Francesca Sidoti 00:03:49
And one of the most popular searches on

Francesca Sidoti 00:03:52
Wikipedia is places.

Heather Ford 00:03:53
So you might be on a holiday or on a road trip and

Heather Ford 00:03:57
you look up the places you're travelling through.

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:01
You're driving. You're about to stop in

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:04
this town.

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:05
You might pull up Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:04:06
What is this place?

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:08
How many people live here?

Heather Ford 00:04:10
What's its history?

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:13
Another scenario. There's breaking news.

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:16
Everyone's searching for locations they've never heard of

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:19
before.

Heather Ford 00:04:19
Where is the Strait of Hormuz?

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:23
Exactly? And it's the Wikipedia article that

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:26
shows up in Google and AI searches.

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:28
Or might even be your Siri result.

Heather Ford 00:04:30
Where is the Strait of Hormuz?!

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:32
Yes!

Heather Ford 00:04:33
Millions of people are learning about that place

Heather Ford 00:04:36
from Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:04:37
It's the go-to platform about places.

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:41
And that kind of poses the question, what does

Francesca Sidoti 00:04:45
Australia look like on Wikipedia?

Heather Ford 00:04:47
Doctor Michael Falk, a chief investigator on the Wiki Histories Project and

Heather Ford 00:04:52
also a senior lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne,

Heather Ford 00:04:55
did just this thing. I asked Michael to...

Michael Falk 00:05:00
Find all the Australian places that are

Michael Falk 00:05:03
mentioned in Wikipedia, 35,000 or so of them,

Michael Falk 00:05:06
and then put them on a map.

Francesca Sidoti 00:05:10
Could you describe that map to us?

Michael Falk 00:05:13
So you can see there are some very brightly coloured parts along the east

Michael Falk 00:05:18
coast and down in the south west corner,

Michael Falk 00:05:22
and then some dark or even just blank parts across most of the

Michael Falk 00:05:25
continent.

Michael Falk 00:05:30
And one of the big pictures that emerges from that is that some

Michael Falk 00:05:34
parts of Australia are extremely written about on Wikipedia.

Michael Falk 00:05:38
They're kind of obvious places like Sydney and Melbourne, whereas vast swathes of the

Michael Falk 00:05:43
continent are only described by a small number of

Michael Falk 00:05:46
articles, which are often very short. Can we see any other

Michael Falk 00:05:50
patterns that emerge?

Michael Falk 00:05:52
So one thing we tried was looking at the number of times

Michael Falk 00:05:55
there are edits on each place,

Michael Falk 00:05:57
and this only accentuated the pattern we'd seen.

Francesca Sidoti 00:06:00
What's the story? Like what? What is going

Francesca Sidoti 00:06:02
on?

Francesca Sidoti 00:06:03
When you look at those maps and listeners can get these maps

Francesca Sidoti 00:06:05
from the Show Notes and the wikihistories website.

Francesca Sidoti 00:06:08
What do you take from it?

Michael Falk 00:06:09
If I had to summarise the biggest things we found by looking at all the

Michael Falk 00:06:13
Australian places in Wikipedia,

Michael Falk 00:06:15
Wikipedia's editors care most about places where people live.

Michael Falk 00:06:21
So towns and villages and suburbs and cities and shops and

Michael Falk 00:06:25
airports.

Michael Falk 00:06:27
The great historian of the internet, Roy Rosenzweig, said

Michael Falk 00:06:31
that Wikipedia had a 'whatever centric bias'.

Michael Falk 00:06:34
And I think that's completely true. Whatever it is that the editor is interested in is the

Michael Falk 00:06:39
most important thing in the world.

Michael Falk 00:06:41
And they lavish so much attention on it.

Heather Ford 00:06:43
So the editors decide what places get included because they're the ones

Heather Ford 00:06:48
volunteering their time to write about them.

Heather Ford 00:06:51
The fewer people in a place, the less attention it gets on

Heather Ford 00:06:55
Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:07:01
So what does it mean for the places that are missing on

Heather Ford 00:07:05
Wikipedia or barely

Heather Ford 00:07:06
covered? Heather.

Francesca Sidoti 00:07:08
Why do you think it matters?

Heather Ford 00:07:10
Well, I think it matters because Wikipedia is so

Heather Ford 00:07:13
central to defining what a place means.

Heather Ford 00:07:16
And that has implications for people living in this place.

Heather Ford 00:07:19
Like for tourism. Wikipedia isn't just a website.

Heather Ford 00:07:24
For most people, it's the front door to knowledge about a place.

Francesca Sidoti 00:07:29
If a place isn't on Wikipedia, or if it's just two lines and an outdated

Francesca Sidoti 00:07:34
population figure as far as the internet is concerned now and into the

Francesca Sidoti 00:07:38
future, that place barely exists.

Heather Ford 00:07:42
So the picture of Australia you get through

Heather Ford 00:07:46
Wikipedia is real, but it's partial.

Heather Ford 00:07:48
It's cut on a bias. It's leaning towards the cities, the coasts,

Heather Ford 00:07:53
tourist attractions with large gaps in between.

Heather Ford 00:08:00
Bias. It's a word that gets thrown around a lot.

Heather Ford 00:08:04
But when I hear it, I think of something you can actually

Heather Ford 00:08:08
touch.

Heather Ford 00:08:09
I'm a seamstress in my other life, and in sewing, the bias is

Heather Ford 00:08:14
a real physical thing you can hold in your hands.

Heather Ford 00:08:18
Woven fabric has a grain threads running from top to bottom.

Heather Ford 00:08:23
Threads running across along the grain. Fabric is stable, but

Heather Ford 00:08:28
there's a third direction,

Heather Ford 00:08:30
a diagonal running at 45 degrees across the threads.

Heather Ford 00:08:35
That's called the bias. Cut along the bias and something

Heather Ford 00:08:40
changes.

Heather Ford 00:08:42
The fabric stretches. It drapes. It falls over the curves of a

Heather Ford 00:08:47
body.

Heather Ford 00:08:48
Instead of hanging stiffly, nothing has been added to the

Heather Ford 00:08:53
cloth.

Heather Ford 00:08:53
The bias was always there, woven into its structure.

Francesca Sidoti 00:09:01
Which brings us back to Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:09:04
Yes, it's been accused of bias from its very

Heather Ford 00:09:08
early days.

Francesca Sidoti 00:09:09
And what did the response from Wikipedia look

Francesca Sidoti 00:09:12
like?

Heather Ford 00:09:12
Okay. Here's co-founder Jimmy Wales.

Jimmy Wales 00:09:15
You know, I think you can always point to specific

Jimmy Wales 00:09:19
entries and talk about specific biases,

Jimmy Wales 00:09:21
but that that's part of the process of Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales 00:09:23
Anyone can come and challenge and to go on about that.

Jimmy Wales 00:09:27
But, you know, I see fairly often on quite extreme

Jimmy Wales 00:09:31
accusations of bias.

Jimmy Wales 00:09:33
And I think, you know, actually, I just I don't see it.

Jimmy Wales 00:09:36
I don't buy that. And if you ask people for an example, they

Jimmy Wales 00:09:40
normally struggle.

Heather Ford 00:09:41
Right from the beginning, Wikipedia has always

Heather Ford 00:09:44
acknowledged that there are gaps.

Francesca Sidoti 00:09:46
So they talk about bias in terms of 'gaps'.

Heather Ford 00:09:49
Yes. And that's really reflected in the logo,

Heather Ford 00:09:53
right?

Heather Ford 00:09:53
It's like a globe where there's missing pieces of a puzzle that

Heather Ford 00:09:57
are being filled in.

Francesca Sidoti 00:09:59
And what about the people on the ground editing

Francesca Sidoti 00:10:01
Wikipedia?

Heather Ford 00:10:02
There were always editors that recognised that

Heather Ford 00:10:05
Wikipedia, its editors, the way they did their work,

Heather Ford 00:10:08
entailed bias. And there's so much in the press right now

Heather Ford 00:10:13
about how Wikipedia is biased.

Heather Ford 00:10:16
Is Wikipedia biased against the American right, or is Wikipedia

Heather Ford 00:10:22
biased against female scientists?

Francesca Sidoti 00:10:25
I mean, kind of amazingly, I think the discourses at the moment are

Francesca Sidoti 00:10:30
that Wikipedia is simultaneously biased against the left and the right.

Heather Ford 00:10:38
Next, we're going to a place in Australia that does have a Wikipedia page,

Heather Ford 00:10:43
because we're wondering when a place is written about in Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:10:48
What does Wikipedia's Version of a place look like to the people

Heather Ford 00:10:52
who actually live there.

Francesca Sidoti 00:10:54
So I went to Penrith in outer western

Francesca Sidoti 00:10:57
Sydney...

Francesca Sidoti 00:10:58
On High Street, which is the main street, asking people about

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:01
what Wikipedia was saying about their home.

Heather Ford 00:11:04
And why Penrith, Fran?

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:07
So Penrith is a place that I know intimately

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:11
from going and spending hours at the Penrith Plaza.

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:14
Now Westfield, as a teenager where they couldn't kick you

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:18
out.

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:19
It's also a really interesting place. We didn't want to look

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:23
at, say, a city suburb.

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:24
We kind of wanted to get a sense of a place where people might be walking out on the street and

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:29
happy to give you a bit of time to look at the page and tell you

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:32
what they thought about it, and whether it represented the place

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:35
they knew so well.

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:37
So what would you expect to be on a Wikipedia page about

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:42
Penrith?

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:43
Penrith Vox Pops: Well, I'd expect the history. It'd be a

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:46
bit of the history, how it was settled,

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:49
and developed, and what it's like today.

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:53
Yeah. Do you want good or bad? Do you know how long I've lived

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:56
here for?

Francesca Sidoti 00:11:57
I don't know how they're going to really portray Penrith as

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:02
something other than it's just a down to earth,

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:05
normal Australian town suburb.

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:08
Can I just show you the front page of the

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:10
Wikipedia article about Penrith?

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:12
Do you have any reactions when you look at it?

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:14
Penrith Vox Pops: I suppose it just doesn't really grab, so to

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:17
speak.

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:17
It's just like a pretty bland... European exploration....

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:25
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's quite good. They've done a bit of a

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:30
layout.

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:31
Yeah. Very nice. I'm surprised they haven't, like, put High

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:36
Street down.

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:37
And what what goes on here? High Street is really iconic.

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:40
Like a lot of stuff happens. The lighting of the Christmas tree,

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:44
like stuff like that.

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:45
I would have thought High Street would definitely be on that.

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:49
We've pushed all these homeless people out and then we're trying to make it gentried. And then

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:53
we've got empty businesses everywhere because the rent is

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:55
horrendous. Would you want to advertise that anywhere?

Francesca Sidoti 00:12:58
You'd want it to be positive, wouldn't you? Like I see

Francesca Sidoti 00:13:03
'Indigenous settlement', but it's not much,

Francesca Sidoti 00:13:07
is it? It's a very short paragraph. I bet you there's

Francesca Sidoti 00:13:10
more about the Europeans, isn't there?

Francesca Sidoti 00:13:16
Of course there is.... Wow. Wow. No, it's sad to see that there's

Francesca Sidoti 00:13:21
only a little paragraph.

Francesca Sidoti 00:13:23
And the rest is about European settlement.

Francesca Sidoti 00:13:28
People got hurt in that time. I don't understand it.

Heather Ford 00:13:37
The page and the place. You can hear it.

Heather Ford 00:13:41
They are not the same thing. There was the encyclopaedic

Heather Ford 00:13:46
stuff that people expected on the page and got.

Heather Ford 00:13:50
And then there were surprises. There's missing information

Heather Ford 00:13:54
about places and traditions important to locals.

Francesca Sidoti 00:13:58
Shops on High Street.

Heather Ford 00:13:59
The page leans positive.

Francesca Sidoti 00:14:01
Like they want to show a particular gentrified

Francesca Sidoti 00:14:04
version of Penrith.

Francesca Sidoti 00:14:05
"I want there to be the Penrith that I know."

Heather Ford 00:14:08
Some topics are much more in depth than others.

Francesca Sidoti 00:14:12
How little there is about First Nations

Francesca Sidoti 00:14:15
history compared to European history in Australia.

Francesca Sidoti 00:14:18
The kind of outrage. Very emotive. Yeah.

Heather Ford 00:14:25
So this is one article, one place.

Francesca Sidoti 00:14:29
But over three years we've looked deeply at a number of Australian places on

Francesca Sidoti 00:14:34
Wikipedia and how they're represented.

Heather Ford 00:14:36
And in our research, something kept showing

Heather Ford 00:14:39
up.

Heather Ford 00:14:40
It's something that a New Zealand comedian happened to sum

Heather Ford 00:14:43
up really well.

Heather Ford 00:14:44
Here's Guy Williams at the 2026 Melbourne Comedy Festival Gala.

Heather Ford 00:14:49
And there's a strong language and content warning for the next

Heather Ford 00:14:53
minute.

Guy Williams 00:14:54
I love this country. It's one of the best

Guy Williams 00:14:57
countries in the world per capita behind New Zealand,

Guy Williams 00:15:01
you know. But you've always screwed me over like I went to

Guy Williams 00:15:05
Perth and there's more to the story than that.

Guy Williams 00:15:08
Uh, when you go to Perth, what's the main tourist attraction?

Guy Williams 00:15:13
Rottnest. They're like, "You got to go to Rotto!" as soon as you

Guy Williams 00:15:17
get off the plane.

Guy Williams 00:15:18
They're like, "Go to Rotto!" in pamphlets, advertisements,

Guy Williams 00:15:21
"You've got to go to Rotto!

Guy Williams 00:15:22
You've got to go to Rotto! It's got beaches, it's got quokkas,

Guy Williams 00:15:27
it's got vintage lighthouses." But then you get to Rottnest

Guy Williams 00:15:31
and they're just like, "Surprise! It's actually the

Guy Williams 00:15:35
site of an Indigenous genocide." Arrgh.

Guy Williams 00:15:37
Fucking Australia's fucked me again. Arrgh...

Guy Williams 00:15:40
by the way, Australia. Your vintage lighthouses suck shit,

Guy Williams 00:15:47
okay?

Guy Williams 00:15:49
They're like 150 years old. I've been to Mexico.

Guy Williams 00:15:52
They had internet cafes older than

Guy Williams 00:15:54
that. Wake up.

Heather Ford 00:16:02
So Guy Williams is making a joke, but what he's saying is actually really

Heather Ford 00:16:08
central to our research on Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:16:12
And the pattern we kept seeing had a name.

Heather Ford 00:16:15
Even if it's not one Wikipedia would use.

Heather Ford 00:16:18
'Colonial' or more precisely, 'neocolonial'.

Francesca Sidoti 00:16:23
We found essentially that Wikipedia articles about Australian places

Francesca Sidoti 00:16:27
were privileging settler colonial perspectives,

Francesca Sidoti 00:16:30
histories, and people's experiences while simultaneously

Francesca Sidoti 00:16:34
diminishing settler colonial violence.

Francesca Sidoti 00:16:36
So only prioritising certain aspects of white Australian history and really quite a lot

Francesca Sidoti 00:16:43
of contestation around the inclusion of First Nations

Francesca Sidoti 00:16:46
experiences and peoples and places, place names.

Heather Ford 00:16:49
It's about two questions, right, Fran? First,

Heather Ford 00:16:54
what is the bias?

Heather Ford 00:16:57
And then the second question is why does this bias exist in the

Heather Ford 00:17:03
research?

Heather Ford 00:17:04
On Wikipedia there's been this connection made between bias and

Heather Ford 00:17:10
editors.

Heather Ford 00:17:12
So let's take a quick look at who edits and what they do.

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:16
Fran, can you tell us how you become an editor

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:19
on Wikipedia?

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:20
Do you apply? Is there a vetting process?

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:23
Age limit? No to all of those. So anyone can edit Wikipedia.

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:28
Right now, you could go to an article on wikipedia.org.

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:33
In the top right corner of the page, there's a blue text link

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:36
that says Edit.

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:37
You click 'Edit' and you're inside. You're in the document you are reading a few seconds

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:43
before and you can add something,

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:46
fix something, click Publish Changes. That is it.

Francesca Sidoti 00:17:50
You are an editor.

Heather Ford 00:17:53
And if you stick around long enough, you may even

Heather Ford 00:17:56
call yourself a 'Wikipedian'.

Heather Ford 00:17:58
There are two kinds of editors. The serious ones who stick

Heather Ford 00:18:03
around and volunteer intensively.

Francesca Sidoti 00:18:05
...And the 'drive-by-nights', the folks who

Francesca Sidoti 00:18:08
dip in because they're testing the waters.

Heather Ford 00:18:10
A lot of Wikipedians take it seriously, and I think it is radical work,

Heather Ford 00:18:16
because who does this anymore,

Heather Ford 00:18:18
you know? We have volunteer firefighters and we have

Heather Ford 00:18:22
librarians, and we have Wikipedians,

Heather Ford 00:18:24
and they're really gathering the threads of our society together

Heather Ford 00:18:28
when so much is pulling us apart.

Francesca Sidoti 00:18:35
So we know Wikipedia editors live all over

Francesca Sidoti 00:18:37
the world.

Francesca Sidoti 00:18:38
Almost half of Wikipedia editors are in Europe and a fifth in

Francesca Sidoti 00:18:42
North America.

Francesca Sidoti 00:18:43
And because of that, 'whatever centric bias' we mentioned, they

Francesca Sidoti 00:18:46
work often on articles about stuff they're interested in from

Francesca Sidoti 00:18:50
wherever they are.

Heather Ford 00:18:51
You've met many Wikipedia editors through the

Heather Ford 00:18:54
wikihistories research.

Francesca Sidoti 00:18:56
Yes. It's the best part of my job.

Heather Ford 00:18:59
So what kinds of people end up editing articles

Heather Ford 00:19:04
about places in Australia and what are they motivated by?

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:09
Really interesting people and very,

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:11
very diverse in their motivations.

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:13
So some people edit a Wikipedia page because they love editing

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:17
census data.

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:18
So the 2020 census is released or whenever it is, and all the new numbers come out and they

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:23
just want to go place by place and

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:26
update population figures. Some people edit Australian places

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:31
because they love copy editing and they find a typo and they

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:35
fix that. Some people edit Wikipedia pages because They're

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:40
from there and they're very attached to the place.

Heather Ford 00:19:43
So you'd assume that people living in Australia

Heather Ford 00:19:46
are the ones writing and editing about

Heather Ford 00:19:49
Australia, right?

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:50
A lot of the time that is the case, but not

Francesca Sidoti 00:19:54
always.

Turnagra 00:19:55
Kia ora, I'm Turnagra. I'm a Wikipedia editor based out

Turnagra 00:19:59
of the Whanganui a Tara

Turnagra 00:20:01
Wellington, New Zealand.

Francesca Sidoti 00:20:02
And Turnagra is his username on Wikipedia and

Francesca Sidoti 00:20:05
what he's asked to be called in the podcast.

Francesca Sidoti 00:20:08
Turnagra is the name of an extinct New Zealand songbird.

Turnagra 00:20:11
I've been editing Wikipedia for over 14 years now,

Turnagra 00:20:15
but I only started proper just before Covid.

Turnagra 00:20:19
I'm a fairly generic Kiwi white guy in his mid 20s.

Francesca Sidoti 00:20:24
And Turnagra is a pretty generic Wikipedia

Francesca Sidoti 00:20:27
editor to.

Francesca Sidoti 00:20:27
I mean, research suggests that the majority of Wikipedia editors are white men across a

Francesca Sidoti 00:20:33
range of ages who are pretty tech savvy.

Heather Ford 00:20:36
So it used to be that research on Wikipedia's biases, said that bias exists

Heather Ford 00:20:42
because of the types of people who edit Wikipedia,

Heather Ford 00:20:46
and the fact that between 80 and 90% of all Wikipedia editors are

Heather Ford 00:20:52
men.

Heather Ford 00:20:53
That explains how something like Middle Earth from Lord of the

Heather Ford 00:20:57
Rings is very well represented on Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:21:01
But we're starting to realise that it's not only about the identities of the people who

Heather Ford 00:21:06
edit Wikipedia that explains these biases.

Jimmy Wales 00:21:09
And we'll hear how this plays out in a story from

Jimmy Wales 00:21:12
Wikipedia editor Tanagra.

Jimmy Wales 00:21:15
So, how did he become an editor?

Francesca Sidoti 00:21:18
Turnagra is interested in New Zealand music,

Francesca Sidoti 00:21:21
and that's what got him into Wikipedia.

Turnagra 00:21:23
There's a really iconic song that I was looking

Turnagra 00:21:27
for information on by a local reggae band called Herbs.

Turnagra 00:21:31
The song 'French Letter' that was quite pivotal in our anti-nuclear movement and the

Turnagra 00:21:36
sort of evolving political landscape of the 1980s and New Zealand.

Turnagra 00:21:40
Herbs 'French Letter' song: Can you see yourself under a coconut

Turnagra 00:21:45
tree?

Turnagra 00:21:46
And there just was no Wikipedia article at all.

Turnagra 00:21:49
And so I was like, okay, well, there's all of these sources

Turnagra 00:21:53
around here, and so I need to change that.

Turnagra 00:21:56
And wrote that article about this fairly pivotal song in our

Turnagra 00:21:59
political history that's all captured on Wikipedia.

Turnagra 00:22:03
Being able to contribute to that was quite cool. Yeah.

Heather Ford 00:22:07
Turnagra has a deep love of place, including

Heather Ford 00:22:11
what places are called on Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:22:14
Names are very complex on Wikipedia.

Francesca Sidoti 00:22:18
Why is that?

Heather Ford 00:22:19
Well, the title of the article about a place has to

Heather Ford 00:22:24
take the 'common name'.

Heather Ford 00:22:27
And the 'common name' is what the majority of reliable sources

Heather Ford 00:22:32
call that place.

Heather Ford 00:22:34
It is not the official name.

Francesca Sidoti 00:22:37
And look, I love the Common Names Policy because I want to call 'The

Francesca Sidoti 00:22:41
Gabba', the stadium in Brisbane,

Francesca Sidoti 00:22:42
'The Gabba'. But there are some places where the implications of

Francesca Sidoti 00:22:45
that are very different.

Heather Ford 00:22:46
Yes, so the Gabba. I am new to Australia, but the

Heather Ford 00:22:52
Gabba, I'm presuming, is a stadium that is

Heather Ford 00:22:56
in colloquial terms called 'The Gabba', but has an official name

Heather Ford 00:23:00
that's very different from that?

Francesca Sidoti 00:23:02
Yes, its official name is the Brisbane

Francesca Sidoti 00:23:05
Cricket Ground, which I have discovered very recently.

Francesca Sidoti 00:23:11
Sometimes there are arguments or controversies about which place

Francesca Sidoti 00:23:14
names the Wikipedia page should use,

Francesca Sidoti 00:23:17
and that argument can be the thing that's interesting or

Francesca Sidoti 00:23:19
attractive to some editors.

Turnagra 00:23:21
Actually, when I was getting more into it, it was

Turnagra 00:23:24
actually around these sort of naming disputes.

Turnagra 00:23:27
The page title being the first thing that people see really shapes how people think about it

Turnagra 00:23:33
and what name people know it as.

Turnagra 00:23:35
So one of the first things I did was there's a volcano up in

Turnagra 00:23:39
Auckland called Maungakiekie One Tree Hill,

Turnagra 00:23:42
but it was known on Wikipedia just by its English name of One

Turnagra 00:23:46
Tree Hill.

Turnagra 00:23:48
Whereas common usage elsewhere had it as the full dual name

Turnagra 00:23:52
Maungakiekie/One Tree Hill.

Turnagra 00:23:54
So I put a move in to try and change that name.

Heather Ford 00:23:59
When Turnagra says 'move', that's Wikipedia speak

Heather Ford 00:24:03
for 'change the name'.

Francesca Sidoti 00:24:05
So Turnagra makes the 'move request' to

Francesca Sidoti 00:24:07
change the names of these articles.

Francesca Sidoti 00:24:09
A Volcano in Auckland... And his requests are approved.

Francesca Sidoti 00:24:12
Names are changed. Other editors around the world, they're asking

Francesca Sidoti 00:24:16
for name changes to every day,

Francesca Sidoti 00:24:19
all the time. So Turnagra logs onto Wikipedia and he goes to

Francesca Sidoti 00:24:23
the list of Move Requests or name change requests,

Francesca Sidoti 00:24:26
and he sees a name he recognises.

Turnagra 00:24:30
And so I'd been reading through some of those Move Requests, and one of the

Turnagra 00:24:34
requests had moved from Fraser Island to K'gari,

Turnagra 00:24:37
and I'd been there when I was a kid. We'd come over to

Turnagra 00:24:40
Queensland and gone on a trip.

DVD advertisement 00:24:43
It is indeed a magnificent destination in sunny Queensland, fraser Island,

DVD advertisement 00:24:48
the world's largest sand island.

DVD advertisement 00:24:52
Fraser Island is so rich in its striking colours and immense beauty of its beaches and sand

DVD advertisement 00:24:57
cliffs that it's been World Heritage listed...

Turnagra 00:24:59
Between April and June 23rd, there were four different

Turnagra 00:25:03
requests, which is a very fast rate for Wikipedia articles.

Heather Ford 00:25:07
Four different editors, all asking to change

Heather Ford 00:25:10
the name of the page 'Fraser Island'.

Francesca Sidoti 00:25:13
This wasn't a coincidence. Something

Francesca Sidoti 00:25:15
incredibly significant was happening.

Francesca Sidoti 00:25:17
Here's Queensland Premier at the time, Annastacia Palaszczuk on

Francesca Sidoti 00:25:21
K'gari reported by ABC news.

ABC News 00:25:23
It's a turning point in our state's history. It

ABC News 00:25:26
really signifies that we are a progressive,

ABC News 00:25:29
modern Queensland. The world's largest sand island was named

ABC News 00:25:34
after Eliza Fraser,

ABC News 00:25:35
who was shipwrecked here in the 1800s. Historians say her stories about the Aboriginal

ABC News 00:25:41
people she met led to dispossession and massacres,

ABC News 00:25:45
making the name 'Fraser Island' a painful reminder.

ABC News 00:25:49
We fought for this for a long time. Lots of generations have

ABC News 00:25:52
fought for this.

ABC News 00:25:53
More than 6000 submissions were received through public

ABC News 00:25:57
consultation last year.

ABC News 00:25:59
About 70% were in favour of the change. The Butchulla people say today is not about renaming but

ABC News 00:26:05
reclaiming their word for the island -

ABC News 00:26:08
'paradise'. The landmark decision means the name 'Fraser

ABC News 00:26:11
Island' will be replaced on maps,

ABC News 00:26:14
road signs and tourist information.

Heather Ford 00:26:16
But not on Wikipedia.

Francesca Sidoti 00:26:20
So to me, that's like a no-brainer, right?

Francesca Sidoti 00:26:22
The Premier has just announced it. It was this huge process.

Francesca Sidoti 00:26:25
It's on the news. But this change doesn't automatically

Francesca Sidoti 00:26:29
happen on Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:26:30
Wikipedia doesn't work like that. There has to be consensus among editors to

Heather Ford 00:26:36
change the name because the official declaration,

Heather Ford 00:26:39
even if it's come on the back of a lengthy democratic, deliberative process, does not

Heather Ford 00:26:45
determine the common name.

Francesca Sidoti 00:26:47
So Wikipedia's rules mean that editors have to wait until there's enough

Francesca Sidoti 00:26:53
sources that are deemed as reliable are calling the thing,

Francesca Sidoti 00:26:57
in this case, gurry, in order to change the title.

Heather Ford 00:27:01
How many sources, you may ask? How many editors.

Heather Ford 00:27:05
You may also ask, how much time should they wait to declare a

Heather Ford 00:27:10
common name?

Heather Ford 00:27:12
Wikipedia does not tell us. Editors just need to work it out

Heather Ford 00:27:17
amongst themselves.

Heather Ford 00:27:19
In the heat of this historic moment.

Turnagra 00:27:22
People started talking and just outright saying that there shouldn't be any more talk

Turnagra 00:27:27
about the name of the article for a while,

Turnagra 00:27:30
because it had been happening so frequently. It had a bit of a

Turnagra 00:27:33
chilling effect.

Heather Ford 00:27:35
The name stays as Fraser Island on Wikipedia.

Francesca Sidoti 00:27:40
So three months pass. Six months pass. A

Francesca Sidoti 00:27:46
year passes.

Turnagra 00:27:50
June 2024, which was about a year after the last

Turnagra 00:27:55
major discussion about the articles name.

Turnagra 00:27:58
So I had a bit of a quiet, long weekend here, and I thought I'd

Turnagra 00:28:03
look into it again because I had nothing better to do at the

Turnagra 00:28:08
time. I went through all references to the island in

Turnagra 00:28:13
either news or academic journal articles.

Turnagra 00:28:17
Since the name change in June 2023 and recorded what name the

Turnagra 00:28:22
island was known as or used in that article.

Turnagra 00:28:26
And that was overwhelmingly in favour of 'K'gari'.

Turnagra 00:28:31
It was something like 353 results, of which 317 used the

Turnagra 00:28:37
name K'gari and only six

Turnagra 00:28:40
used Fraser Island by itself. So it was a very clear like this is

Turnagra 00:28:45
unambiguously now known by the name Guti.

Turnagra 00:28:49
And so I put all of that evidence up, based the rationale in the various bits of policy

Turnagra 00:28:55
and guidelines that Wikipedia has.

Turnagra 00:28:57
To some extent. It's almost like you're a lawyer and you're trying to build the case and

Turnagra 00:29:03
you're getting your evidence together,

Turnagra 00:29:05
and then you present your case to the court and you'll have the

Turnagra 00:29:10
jury weighing in and engaging in it.

Turnagra 00:29:13
And then the person at the end comes in and acts as the final

Turnagra 00:29:17
judge and rules based on the strength of each argument.

Turnagra 00:29:22
And that I had assumed, based on how overwhelming the usage was,

Turnagra 00:29:27
would be a fairly uncontroversial discussion,

Turnagra 00:29:32
which clearly was naive. That discussion took about 3 or 4

Turnagra 00:29:36
weeks.

Turnagra 00:29:37
There were quite a few people involved. There were a lot of strong views on both sides and

Turnagra 00:29:44
strong views that would be more at

Turnagra 00:29:47
home in a Facebook comment section like 'this is the

Turnagra 00:29:51
Anglosphere'.

Turnagra 00:29:52
This is how it's always been known. That can feel almost like a personal affront to them if

Turnagra 00:29:58
you're trying to change something that they've known by this name.

Francesca Sidoti 00:30:02
It gets personal.

Turnagra 00:30:04
You can have all the evidence you want, but if people

Turnagra 00:30:07
don't like it, they will just oppose it.

Turnagra 00:30:09
So it does vary. And I think that also speaks to just the

Turnagra 00:30:13
fact that it's run by volunteers.

Turnagra 00:30:16
And so everyone has slightly different perspectives on things

Turnagra 00:30:19
in different levels of experience.

Turnagra 00:30:21
So you're never going to get the exact same process twice.

Heather Ford 00:30:25
In practice, consensus is really just determined when editors stop

Heather Ford 00:30:30
disagreeing with one another.

Francesca Sidoti 00:30:32
And a lot of the editors I spoke with had actually increasingly just moved

Francesca Sidoti 00:30:36
further and further away from editing those pages because the contention had

Francesca Sidoti 00:30:40
become exhausting or frustrating.

Turnagra 00:30:43
It's a slog, and it's something that at a certain

Turnagra 00:30:46
point you're sort of like, well,

Turnagra 00:30:48
what's what's the point in doing this if I'm just spending all my

Turnagra 00:30:52
time arguing with randoms on the internet?

Heather Ford 00:30:54
Turnagra points out an interesting paradox about

Heather Ford 00:30:57
Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:30:58
While Wikipedia is constantly changing and is the biggest site

Heather Ford 00:31:03
for breaking news...

Turnagra 00:31:04
Wikipedia has a tendency to really strongly

Turnagra 00:31:07
favour the status quo.

Turnagra 00:31:09
But because there is so much inertia in favour of the current

Turnagra 00:31:12
title, it's very difficult to overcome that.

Turnagra 00:31:15
And that means that Wikipedia can quite often sort of lag

Turnagra 00:31:18
behind the rest of contemporary usage.

Turnagra 00:31:21
So one example at the moment is the renaming of Turkey and the

Turnagra 00:31:27
fact that that's still at the name Turkey because usage

Turnagra 00:31:31
is still unclear on what is going to emerge in the long run.

Turnagra 00:31:34
So it tries to take a bit more of a conservative approach until

Turnagra 00:31:38
there's a clear pattern of,

Turnagra 00:31:40
'Okay, this is the name that people are using now.' The

Turnagra 00:31:44
status quo has such power.

Turnagra 00:31:47
At about the end of June 2024, after a month of discussion,

Turnagra 00:31:52
that discussion was finally closed in favour of

Turnagra 00:31:57
the name Gati.

Francesca Sidoti 00:31:58
And the name of the Wikipedia page was

Francesca Sidoti 00:32:00
finally changed from its former name, Fraser Island,

Francesca Sidoti 00:32:02
to its official name, Garry, a full year after its official

Francesca Sidoti 00:32:06
name was declared.

Turnagra 00:32:08
And then being able to go and make that change was

Turnagra 00:32:11
like, great.

Turnagra 00:32:12
To be able to actually see that happen and be part of that.

Heather Ford 00:32:15
Not all Wikipedians will do this, but there are many among them that

Heather Ford 00:32:20
do this incredible work of trying to mediate very polarised positions like

Heather Ford 00:32:24
Turnagra did.

Francesca Sidoti 00:32:26
And this is very heavy work emotionally.

Heather Ford 00:32:29
And it could be dangerous because there are

Heather Ford 00:32:32
major threats of harassment.

Francesca Sidoti 00:32:33
And it's also incredibly time consuming.

Heather Ford 00:32:41
Many would see this as a success. It took a

Heather Ford 00:32:45
while, but Wikipedia got the name right in the end.

Francesca Sidoti 00:32:48
But others, including editors I interviewed,

Francesca Sidoti 00:32:51
see it as an example of Wikipedia's conservatism.

Heather Ford 00:32:54
It took a whole year after the announcement where multiple editors

Heather Ford 00:32:59
continuously tried to change the name that was preceded by the biggest place

Heather Ford 00:33:04
name consultation ever undertaken in Queensland.

Francesca Sidoti 00:33:08
Is there a fix to this?

Heather Ford 00:33:11
So Wikipedia sees itself as a follower rather than

Heather Ford 00:33:16
a leader.

Heather Ford 00:33:16
It's an encyclopaedia, not a newspaper, so it needs to follow

Heather Ford 00:33:21
what reliable sources are saying in aggregate about a

Heather Ford 00:33:25
subject. And I think that's correct. That makes sense for

Heather Ford 00:33:29
most places.

Heather Ford 00:33:31
But in the context of Australia and other countries with a

Heather Ford 00:33:35
painful colonial past,

Heather Ford 00:33:37
the weaponization of the common name rule caused harm.

Heather Ford 00:33:42
Wikipedians can also change the rules to deal with local

Heather Ford 00:33:46
circumstances, and they could do that here.

Heather Ford 00:33:53
The biases we've heard about that shape what Australia looks like on Wikipedia, favouring

Heather Ford 00:33:59
settler colonial history and urban places.

Heather Ford 00:34:02
They're part of the fabric of Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:34:06
It used to be that bias exists because of the types of people

Heather Ford 00:34:11
who edit Wikipedia.

Heather Ford 00:34:14
We're starting to realise that it's not only about the

Heather Ford 00:34:17
identities of the people who edit Wikipedia,

Heather Ford 00:34:20
it's about the rules and about practices, and it's about the

Heather Ford 00:34:25
system of Wikipedia that's been built up over time.

Heather Ford 00:34:29
And that that actually is a huge barrier to including knowledge

Heather Ford 00:34:35
about the world.

Heather Ford 00:34:37
Why this happens is this great way of understanding what we can

Heather Ford 00:34:41
do better, how we can make it better because we can,

Heather Ford 00:34:44
because it's Wikipedia, it's in the hands of the people.

Heather Ford 00:34:49
Next time on All That We Touch: Wikipedia.

Francesca Sidoti 00:34:53
Wikipedia made a promise to be the sum of all

Francesca Sidoti 00:34:57
human knowledge.

Heather Ford 00:34:58
It's a big promise. And to keep it or break

Heather Ford 00:35:02
it, people have been fighting.

Francesca Sidoti 00:35:05
And these fights shape the Wikipedia you

Francesca Sidoti 00:35:08
use today.

Heather Ford 00:35:09
There's a woman who built French Wikipedia from

Heather Ford 00:35:13
scratch with three people.

Heather Ford 00:35:14
No rules. And the Wikipedia co-founder who told her what

Heather Ford 00:35:18
you're doing is actually quite useless.

Francesca Sidoti 00:35:21
Spoiler alert! She disagreed.

Heather Ford 00:35:24
There's a fight. About what knowledge counts.

Francesca Sidoti 00:35:27
And then the biggest fight of all... To

Francesca Sidoti 00:35:31
include or to delete.

Heather Ford 00:35:34
Three fights that shape Wikipedia. That's episode

Heather Ford 00:35:38
two coming next.

Heather Ford 00:35:42
For links, research videos, and episode transcripts, see the

Heather Ford 00:35:45
Show Notes in your podcast app.

Francesca Sidoti 00:35:48
The Executive Producer of this series is

Francesca Sidoti 00:35:50
Heather Ford.

Heather Ford 00:35:51
Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate Producer is

Heather Ford 00:35:55
Francesca Sidoti.

Francesca Sidoti 00:35:56
Story consultant is Rachael Cusick.

Francesca Sidoti 00:35:59
Sound by John Jacobs.

Heather Ford 00:36:00
Bell music composition by Maxim

Heather Ford 00:36:03
Voloshin-Cleary.

Francesca Sidoti 00:36:04
Executive producer of UTS Impact Studios

Francesca Sidoti 00:36:07
is Sarah Gilbert.

Heather Ford 00:36:08
This podcast is made with the support of the

Heather Ford 00:36:10
Australian Research Council.

Francesca Sidoti 00:36:12
And it's produced on Gadigal Country in

Francesca Sidoti 00:36:14
Sydney, Australia.

Francesca Sidoti 00:36:16
Find out more at wikihistories.net