Francesca Sidoti and Heather Ford
This article appeared in Agora vol. 60, no. 3 (2025). Agora is the triannual journal of the History Teachers Association of Victoria.
Wikipedia’s representation of Australian places tends to delegitimise Australia’s First Nations history though a very particular application of its rules by its editors.
On 7 June 2023, the Queensland government restored K’Gari as the official name for the island off the Queensland coast that had been known as Fraser Island since 1836. This name restoration was the culmination of decades of advocacy andconsultation. The Butchalla people, who are the traditional owners of K’Gari, had campaigned for decades for the namerestoration as part of their native title claim.1
By 2011, the Queensland government recorded two alternative names for the island: K’Gari and Gari.2 In 2021, the Fraser World Heritage Area was renamed to K’gari (Fraser Island) World Heritage Area, and the Queensland government commenced the process to officially rename the island. Finally, after the largest placename consultation ever undertaken in Queensland, and more than 6000 submissions, the official naming restoration process concluded in 2023.3
One year later, in July 2024, the Wikipedia article about the island was moved from ‘Fraser Island’ to ‘K’Gari’.4 Why did it take so long for Wikipedia to change the article’s name?
For anyone with experience of the lengthiness of government processes, it might be surprising that a government moved faster than an open-source volunteer-driven digital platform that ‘anyone can edit’. For many, Wikipedia is a bastion of credibility in a wasteland of manipulative media. Its NPOV (neutral point of view) policy seems to enable editors to evade significant disputes about truth by simply pointing to what reliable sources say about a subject rather than relying on the opinions of its editors.
Our research suggests something different. In this short article we will show how Wikipedia’s representations are often the result of significant struggles over what should be represented there. Rather than a fight between fringe views and scientific consensus, there are often many viable alternatives to representing knowledge on the encyclopedia. What ends up being represented on Wikipedia is not a neutral perspective achieved through editors’ biases cancelling one another out. Rather, it is the (always temporary) success of one vision of how Wikipedia should represent the world over another.
In the case of articles about Australian places, the vision is a conservative one that tends to delegitimise Australia’s First Nations history. This is achieved through a very particular application of Wikipedia’s rules that hint at alternative roads not taken.
Acknowledging Place
How English Wikipedia acknowledges First Nations placenames provides a window into the ways in which knowledge is produced on the platform. In our extensive interviews with editors of Australian place articles, the acknowledgement of First Nations placenames came up consistently as the subject of particularly frequent and heated debates.5
Nine of the fourteen editors we spoke with discussed the subject and exemplified the diversity of positions on the inclusion of First Nations placenames. There are advocates, fence-sitters and opposers. Three advocate editors—Lucas, Blake and Gabriel—actively worked to incorporate First Nations placenames on Wikipedia. Indeed, it was Lucas’ main focus for his editing practice.
Others–fence-sitters–tried to stay out of it. James said: ‘One part of me wants to kind of go “let’s get the Aboriginal names correct!” But I can also imagine that that would be quite heated.’
Finally, the opposers in our sample, Nate and David, have both contested the inclusion of a First Nations placename in a Wikipedia article.
This diversity of positions is reflected in how editors understand and deploy Wikipedia policies in practice to support their positions. The recent change from Fraser Island to K’Gari came on the back of five unsuccessful attempts. In each case, the majority of Wikipedia editors opposed the change because they said that it didn’t comply with its naming conventions.
Two Wikipedia policies are particularly important in relation to decisions about article names: the ‘reliable sources’ policy and the ‘common name’ policy for article titles. Wikipedia editors are supposed to only include information if it is ‘based on reliable, independent, published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy’.6 The common name policy, Blake explained, is about using the name most commonly used in reliable sources.7 ‘So,’ he said, ‘you wouldn’t call the article about Australia [the]“Commonwealth of Australia”… you’d call it “Australia”’
Conflicts emerge when editors argue over which are the most reliable sources and how to determine what is ‘commonly used’. Wikipedia’s reliable sources policy establishes a hierarchy of sources, from ‘preferred’ (e.g. scholarly sources) to ‘questionable’ (e.g. social media sites).
However, Wikipedia editors regularly make ‘local’ rules to apply to particular types of articles that establish reliability in a particular field of knowledge. The geographic placenames policy, for example, indicates that gazetteers,maps and geographic names databases constitute ‘(d)isinterested, authoritative reference works [which] are almost always reliable’.8
This suggests two ways of determining the canonical name. On the one hand, editors should refer to the most reliable sources (e.g. gazetteers) to determine the canonical name. On the other hand, editors should determine what the majority of reliable sources use to refer to the entity.
These rules will sometimes conflict, as they did in the case of the K’Gari article. Rather than look to the official gazette as the authority on the source, editors who participated in the 2023 discussion looked instead at what was ‘commonly’ beingused, even though there had been little time to establish common usage trends.
In the case of K’Gari, Blake explained
Someone will move it from Fraser Island to K’Gari and [imitates speech] ‘No, no, it’s the common name!’ Everyone will be confused. Then they’ll do these things, like, they’ll look at Google Book Ngrams. They’ll generate all these graphs of usage of whether the term ‘K’Gari’ or ‘Fraser Island’ is used in Google Books, which hasn’t been updated since 2013 maybe.
Blake described these kinds of arguments as ‘painful’ and indicative of how official Wikipedia policies are deployed, perhaps in different ways to how the policy had been initially designed. Gabriel said something similar: ‘I find the Wikipedia discussions often descend into weaponising procedures and policies against each other’.
Examining the discussions on Wikipedia’s talk page, the weaponisation of policies becomes clear. Before the Queensland government renamed K’Gari, Wikipedia editors pointed to the gazette to argue that the name was not yet official. After the government renamed K’Gari, they pointed to search results to argue that the name was not yet ‘common’.
The opposers won out over the advocates even though the June 2023 discussion—very soon after the official renaming—could have resulted in a change. Indeed, when the page was finally changed in 2024, the arbitrator stated: ‘If I’m being frightfully honest, reading through the June 2023 [discussion], I would’ve closed that as a move too’. In other words, according to the arbitrator, the name change could and probably should have been done the previous year.
Disagreements around the inclusion of First Nations placenames were not only common but heated. Gabriel said the most recent placename debate they had been involved in had been ‘very antagonistic and not particularly pleasant, to be frankly honest’. At the time of the interview, Lucas had stopped editing Wikipedia articles entirely. ‘To still have to be making these arguments,’ he said, ‘it’s just really, really frustrating. And yeah, I just ran out of energy for it.’
Our research also found that Wikipedia’s representation of Australian places is often characterised by deep anxiety about the meanings, moral value and ongoing implications of the colonisation of Australia.9 Contentions around First Nations placenames is a lightning rod for this anxiety.
Implications for History Teaching
The research asks what we can learn about how people contingently resolve the history of a place like Australia in the context of our data-centric knowledge ecologies. Our goal is not to show that Wikipedia is somehow a ‘bad’ source. Rather, we hope to inform teaching and learning to help students and the public to critically engage with Wikipedia as a source of knowledge about the world that, like others, suffers from biases and omissions. We do this by showing how people and technology, working together (and against one another), affect modern historical representations on Wikipedia.
For History teachers, Wikipedia can be much more than a source. The K’Gari article demonstrates knowledge-in-the-making: it is the result of a consensus between a very particular group of people making sense of the world using tools and rules at their disposal.
History teachers could work with their students to examine the discussions taking place behind the scenes of articles about Australian places to ask:
- What are editors arguing about?
- On what basis are they making decisions about what are the ‘alternative’ names that point to the single canonicalname of an article?
- Did editors suggest alternative ways of applying Wikipedia’s rules that were not adopted?
Studying these processes is an opportunity to understand how history is being made and remade in the current digital knowledge ecosystem, and to understand what alternatives are always available to the technologies that seem so inevitable.
Endnotes:
- J. Robertson, ‘Paradise Restored: K’gari Native Title Success the Start of a New Story for Fraser Island,’ The Guardian, 24 October 2014, https://www.theguardian. com/australia-news/2014/ oct/24/-sp-paradise-restored-kgari-native-title-success-the-start-of-a-new-story-for-fraser-island
- Queensland Place Names Search,’ Queensland Government, https://www. qld.gov.au/environment/ land/title/place-names/ queensland-place-names-search
- ‘About the Name Change,’ Department of Natural Resources and Mines, Manufacturing and Regional and Rural Development, https://www. nrmmrrd.qld.gov.au/ land-property/initiatives/ kgari/about
- ‘K’gari,’ Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/K%27gari
- H. Ford, F. Sidoti, M. Falk, T. Pietsch and T. Byers, How Australian Places Are Represented on Wikipedia: A Report of the Wikistories Project (University of Technology, Sydney, 2024), https://doi.org/10.5281/ zenodo.13910503
- ‘Wikipedia: Reliable Sources,’ Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/w/index. php?title= Wikipedia:Reliable_ sources&oldid=1298649847.
- ‘Wikipedia: Article Titles,’ Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/w/index. php?title= Wikipedia:Article_ titles&oldid=1303063187# Use_commonly_ recognizable_names.
- ‘Wikipedia: Naming Conventions (Geographic Names),’ Wikipedia, https:// en.wikipedia.org/w/index. php?title=Wikipedia: Naming_conventions_ (geographic_ names)&oldid=1303720962.
- Ford et al., How Australian Places Are Represented on Wikipedia.