Edit Wars in a Contested Digital City: Mapping Wikipedia’s Uneven Augmentations of Berlin

Abstract

Wikipedia is an information geography made up of millions of geotagged articles, which augment places with digital layers. These layers shape how people understand, move through, and interact with the world. As such, it is crucial to interrogate how places are augmented with digital layers and by whom. This article builds on the digital geography literature with a novel methodology that can be used to understand the digital representations of cities on Wikipedia, their provenance, as well as the scope and scale of “edit wars” that have shaped such layers. This methodology is demonstrated through a case study on Berlin, Germany. Cartographic analysis of about 8,000 geotagged articles reveals that these articles cluster in the city center, whereas outer districts are largely unrepresented on Wikipedia. Ten articles have had “edit wars” and nine of these are about contentious historical periods. Cartographic analysis of the locations of the editors of these articles reveals that the edit wars were mostly waged outside of Germany, raising questions about whose voices prevail in the digital representation of local places. The article concludes with a discussion of the results and directions for future work on the development of the methodology and the analysis of further cities.