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Does Wikipedia represent ‘the sum of all human knowledge’? Examining the geographical scope of a peer-produced encyclopedia

Does Wikipedia represent ‘the sum of all human knowledge’? Examining the geographical scope of a peer-produced encyclopedia

Overview

In collaboration with a multidisciplinary group of researchers from the Oxford and Minnesota, this project aims to build a series of visualizations to investigate the geographical scope of Wikipedia. The key research question for the project is to understand to what extent Wikipedia reflects different narratives of the world in its different language versions by analysing the provenance of Wikipedia’s sources and citations. Instead of merely presenting the analyses as clean, closed visualizations, the team will document the process as it evolves, highlighting the decisions made to select particular data for each dataset. The goals of the project are twofold: to produce rigorous analyses that bring Wikipedia’s geographical scope to the forefront, and to experiment with a method and model for researchers to produce rigorous analyses that can be replicated and/or interrogated in the future.

Fell Fund

Key Information

Funder:
  • John Fell OUP Research Fund
  • Project dates:
    June 2014 - August 2014

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