World Heritage sites on Wikipedia: Cultural heritage activism in a context of constrained agency

Abstract

UNESCO World Heritage sites are places of outstanding significance and often key sources of information that influence how people interact with the past today. The process of inscription on the UNESCO list is complicated and intersects with political and commercial controversies. But how well are these controversies known to the public? Wikipedia pages on these sites offer a unique dataset for insights into public understanding of heritage controversies. The unique technicity of Wikipedia, with its bot ecosystem and editing mechanics, shapes how knowledge about cultural heritage is constructed and how controversies are negotiated and communicated. In this article, we investigate the patterns of production, consumption, and spatial and temporal distributions of Wikipedia pages for World Heritage cultural sites. We find that Wikipedia provides a distinctive context for investigating how people experience and relate to the past in the present. The agency of participants is highly constrained, but distinctive, behind-the-scenes expressions of cultural heritage activism are evident. Concerns about state-like actors, violence and destruction, deal-making, etc. in the World Heritage inscription process are present, but rare on Wikipedia’s World Heritage pages. Instead, hyper-local and process issues dominate controversies on Wikipedia. We describe how this kind of research, drawing on Big Data and data science methods, contributes to digital heritage studies and also reveals its limitations.

Heritage transformations

“…It is in step with an activist understanding of digital heritage research that is intent on fostering positive social change (Bonacchi and Krzyzanska, 2019). Further reflection on the networking of technicity and users is empirically investigated by Marwick and Smith (2021), who detail the relations between contributors, bots, language, the infrastructure of Wikipedia and World Heritage Sites (WHSs). In doing so, the authors describe a situation where the public front of heritage is homogenised and sanitised through datification, while 'hidden' material traces of past vandalism and the controversies surrounding WHS nominations also persist.…”

“…These ontologies are revealed to be the expression of a dominating Anglosphere, whose values are inscribed in the data practices of Wikipedians. Marwick and Smith (2021) argue that webpages of an apparently ‘democratising’ Encyclopaedia actually perpetuate the legacy of the British Empire and, encapsulated in it, of the pre-modern past which contributed to inspire it (e.g. Roman imperialism; Bonacchi et al, 2018; Hingley, 2000).…”

Heritage and Nationalism

“…Social researchers have tried to understand whether -and how -the availability of this material of unprecedented kind is, in actual fact, changing the questions that they ask, the methods, technical apparata and practices they adopt, not to mention the knowledge they produce and the ways in which they communicate it (Kitchin 2014b;Leonelli 2014;Schroeder 2014a;Felt 2016;Youtie, Porter and Huang 2017;Lipworth et al 2017;Lauro et al 2017). This level of critical scrutiny into the methodologies, epistemologies and ethics of research informed by big data is unparalleled in the humanities (Eijnatten, Pieters and Verheul 2013;Schoch 2013;Schroeder 2014a;Schäfer and Van Es 2017;Schiuma and Carlucci 2018), and the specific contribution of heritage scholars to discuss the topic has been especially limited (Bonacchi, Altaweel and Krzyzanska 2018;Richardson 2018;Bonacchi and Krzyzanska 2019;Altaweel and Hadjitofi 2020;Bonacchi 2021a;Bonacchi 2021b;Bonacchi and Krzyzanska 2021;Marwick and Smith 2021). The next chapter is dedicated to addressing these omissions.…”