Representation of Non-Western Cultural Knowledge on Wikipedia: The Case of the Visual Arts

Abstract

We explore gaps in Wikipedia's coverage of the visual arts by comparing the representation of 100 artists and 100 artworks from the Western canon against corresponding sets of notable artists and artworks from non-Western cultures. We measure the coverage of these two sets of topics across Wikipedia as a whole and for its individual language versions. We also compare the coverage for Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, sister-projects of Wikipedia that host digital media and structured data. We show that all these platforms strongly favour the Western canon, giving many times more coverage to Western art. We highlight specific examples of differing coverage of visual art inside and outside the Western canon. We find that European language versions of Wikipedia are generally more "Western" in their coverage and Asian languages more "global", with interesting exceptions. We suggest how both Wikipedia and the wider cultural sector can address this gap in content and thus give Wikipedia a truly global perspective on the visual arts.

Wikidata as Semantic Infrastructure: Knowledge Representation, Data Labor, and Truth in a More-Than-Technical Project

“…Questions of representation involve who is producing data, who is silenced by data, and how meaning is closed through data production. Wikidata, for example, follows Wikipedia in its Western, male biases; Ahmed and Poulter (2022) find “just under four times as many statements about Western artists as non-Western artists, and nine times as many statements about Western as non-Western masterpieces” (p. 12). Furthermore, Wikidata’s role in constructing knowledge lies beyond the number of statements about individual groups.…”