Frozen by the violence unfolding in real time on my screens, I began to consume information on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a bulimic manner.
I downloaded books, I read articles, I watched movies and like many others, I consulted… Wikipedia. As history is written almost live on the pages of this collective online encyclopedia, the contributors are not idle. On the French-speaking page devoted to the 2023 Israel-Hamas war, there were an average of 70 modifications per day, while the English-speaking page was closer to 372 daily modifications, at the beginning of November.
Digging through the archives of these pages reveals statistics, information about Wikipedians, the discussions they have with each other, and the history of their hard work. This is how I learned that the French-speaking Wikipedian responsible for more than a third of the available text on this war, Mylenos, was bedridden by a medieval flu. This type of information highlights the social construction of history, but it also makes those who are passionate about objectivity unsafe. Because wasn’t it worrying to grasp so clearly that history is written by humans and that it is the work of different subjectivities?
If I adhere to Wikipedia’s mission, namely free access to knowledge, I am also fascinated by the sometimes eccentric historical gems that the encyclopedia conceals.
For example, I discovered the existence of water tart, a dessert from the Great Depression, as well as the school notes of Onfim, a young boy who engraved his homework on paper. birch bark more than 700 years ago. One of my favorite digital projects, Depths of Wikipedia1, is also busy extracting this type of surprising entry from the depths of the beast. When Annie Rauwerda, the American behind this popular Instagram account, came to Montreal last April, I went to see her perform at the Fairmount Theater. However, more than the discoveries that she discussed in her show, it was the stories about the Wikipedians themselves that struck me, like that of the young couple who illustrate the article on the high five2 (top) for almost 15 years, and who ended up getting married and having children.
By focusing on the humans responsible for the content available on the online encyclopedia, Rauwerda explains the embodied nature of knowledge. It shows us that we can never completely divorce knowledge from the bodies that generate it, whether on Wikipedia or elsewhere. This should not deter us from it, however, because history has never been neutral.
According to AM Trépanier, Wikimedian artist in residence at the Cinémathèque québécoise, knowledge is subjective. “It’s built collectively. Traditional encyclopedias like Britannica are written by people who are not necessarily aware of issues that affect the diversity of experiences in the world. […] An encyclopedia therefore deserves much more to be written collectively than by very targeted individuals. » According to AM Trépanier, the rich regional, cultural and linguistic diversity of Wikipedia even constitutes one of its strengths.
However, to represent a diversity of points of view, you must first ensure that you have varied contributors. In this sense, Wikipedia has shortcomings.
Gender bias, for example, is a widely documented problem on the platform. A survey carried out by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2011 reportedly revealed that at the time, only 9% of people contributing to Wikipedia3 around the world identified as women. This disparity is reflected in particular by a fewer number of female historical figures listed in the encyclopedia. This is a problem that international communities such as Art+Feminism are trying to solve.4which wants to improve the representation of women, trans and non-binary people, people of color and indigenous communities on the site.
I spoke with AM Trépanier, who was returning from the Abitibi-Témiscamingue International Cinema Festival. There, the Cinémathèque québécoise worked to promote Quebec cinema and regional cinema on Wikipedia, by collaborating in particular with the Croissant boréal WikiClub5, a delightful project which aims to write and improve articles concerning the regions of Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Nord-du-Québec and northeastern French-speaking Ontario. It is clear that conscious and deliberate efforts must be made to preserve our cultural heritage.
Since history is dependent on those who write it, I can’t help but think that it is also inseparable from power: what stories are we amplifying? And conversely, whose voices are we silencing? Because to contribute to Wikipedia, you still need to have access to a computer and an internet connection. However, as is the case in several recent conflicts such as the Tigray war or the Israel-Hamas war, it happens that the civilian population finds itself, even sporadically, cut off from the world. This closure of telecommunications services and the internet, whether deliberate or not, allows the opposing camp to control the narration of a story in the making.