Wikipedia war of words waged over First Nations names
Kat Wong |
First Nations place names are embroiled in a Wikipedia storm as Australia’s history wars play out in humanity’s most influential source of knowledge.
Wikipedia’s article for K’gari became the site of a year-long edit war as contributors jostled over retaining its European name after the Queensland government officially renamed the heritage-listed island in 2023.
Other entries on Australian places show attempts to remove Indigenous names, research has found.
The online encyclopedia could be edited by anyone but in reality, those editing it were not representative, Wikimedia Australia president Elliott Bledsoe said.
“That’s why things like First Nations place names become – I would argue – unnecessarily controversial,” he told a South by Southwest Sydney panel on Tuesday.
On an additional, less-visible layer of the website, editors were making decisions about how content is made.
“They’re setting the rules in what should be an open and collaborative space,” he said.
“(Wikipedia) is communities creating knowledge consensus through debate and without a lot of critical reflection on who those communities are.”
The ferocity and frequency of these battles have been likened to the history wars of the late 1990s, a public debate over how Indigenous perspectives were represented in Australia’s colonial history.
Some have blamed them on a lack of First Nations editors.
In an analysis of 35,000 Wikipedia entries of Australian places, only six per cent had an associated First Nations name and others showed attempts to remove Indigenous names, University of Technology, Sydney Professor Heather Ford found.
Wikimedia Australia had attempted to make the site more culturally safe and ensure it did not become the target of “edit war bullshit”, Mr Bledsoe said.
“But also, why do we assume we are the right place for that knowledge?” he said.
“If communities want their knowledge in that space, we need to do more to make that appropriate and work for those communities.
“But it’s also OK for us not to be where all knowledge is.”
Despite the site’s shortcomings, it remains a beloved resource referred to as the “last best place on the internet” by journalist Richard Cooke.
It is also confronting several challenges include attacks from American conservatives claiming it is biased, as well as constant trawling by generative AI chatbots.
The bots flood Wikipedia with traffic and drive up the cost of server maintenance while diverting human eyes – and donations – away from the non-profit site.
These forces combined threatened not just Wikipedia but the concept of any single authoritative source of knowledge, Cooke warned.
“This is the end of an encyclopedic age,” he told the panel.
“It has had all sorts of problems and had to be qualified in all sorts of ways but it was a real thing that really started in the Enlightenment.
“The scale and size that (Wikipedia) got to being almost exclusively written by humans will never be repeated … because almost all the things that are replacing it look like shit.”
AAP
