Words as Weapons: How Wikipedia Became a Battlefield for Cultural Heritage
Course Overview
Wikipedia presents itself as a neutral encyclopedia — the sum of human knowledge, freely shared. But beneath its familiar surface, a quieter conflict is unfolding. In the digital age, Wikipedia has become one of the most consequential arenas for the contestation of cultural memory: who gets to name a monument, define a tradition, claim a historical territory, or represent a community to the world. This seminar investigates how state and non-state actors manipulate Wikipedia’s open editing infrastructure to advance nationalist agendas, erase minority cultural heritage, and reshape collective memory at scale — with consequences that reach far beyond the encyclopedia itself, into search engines, AI training data, and public discourse.
The communities most vulnerable to this erasure share a common feature: they are already marginal in the structures that govern knowledge production. Minority and stateless peoples, diaspora communities, women scholars and historical figures, and LGBTQ individuals and traditions are disproportionately targeted — their Wikipedia presence suppressed, distorted, or simply never built in the first place. A medieval Armenian queen, a Ukrainian woman poet, a queer cultural practice that predates its own criminalization: each leaves a different kind of trace, and each is erased by a different combination of nationalist agenda and platform indifference. Drawing on methods from corpus linguistics and digital humanities, the seminar examines these patterns together — not as separate problems, but as expressions of a single dynamic in which digital infrastructure replicates and amplifies the exclusions of the offline
world.
Each week, participants will examine a concrete case, moving from the contestation of heritage sites in active conflict zones, to coordinated editing campaigns targeting women and LGBTQ figures, to the structural features of Wikipedia that make it both powerful and vulnerable to manipulation. No prior expertise is required. The seminar is designed for anyone curious about the politics of knowledge, the fight for visibility in digital space, and what it means — for a people, a woman, a community — to exist in the twenty-first century’s most consulted encyclopedia.
Seminar Leaders
Dr. Hamest Tamrazyan
Scientific Coordinator
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
Dr. Hamest Tamrazyan is a Scientific Coordinator at EPFL’s Digital Humanities Laboratory and an Associate Professor at Ukrainian State Dragomanov University, specializing in linguistics and digital epigraphy. Her research focuses on digitally preserving endangered Armenian and Ukrainian inscriptions, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the British Library.
Dr. Svitlana Matvieieva
Dr. Sc., Professor
Dragomanov Ukrainian State University
Dr. Svitlana Matvieieva is a Professor of Applied Linguistics and Translation Studies at Dragomanov Ukrainian State University in Kyiv. Her research combines corpus linguistics, terminology studies, and digital humanities to examine how language shapes cultural memory and heritage representation, with a focus on multilingual and conflict-sensitive discourse, and she continues her teaching and research under wartime conditions in Ukraine.
Syllabus and Readings
Course Schedule
WED, OCT 7
Week 1: Wikipedia is not Neutral: Open Knowledge and Power
Hosted on Zoom
Suggested Readings
- Joseph Reagle, Good Faith Collaboration, Introduction, selected pages.
- Wikipedia, “Neutral Point of View” policy page, selected excerpts.
- Wikipedia, “Verifiability” policy page, selected excerpts.
- Heather Ford, Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age, selected pages.
WED, OCT 14
Week 2: Cultural Heritage as a Battlefield of Memory
Hosted on Zoom
Suggested Readings
- Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage, selected pages from Introduction.
- Lynn Meskell, A Future in Ruins, selected pages.
- UNESCO, short excerpt on heritage protection in conflict.
- Aleida Assmann, selected excerpt on cultural memory and the archive.
WED, OCT 21
Week 3: How Digital Erasure Happens: Edits, Deletions, Renaming
Hosted on Zoom
Suggested Readings
- Wikipedia, “Deletion policy,” selected excerpts.
- Wikipedia, “Article titles,” selected excerpts.
- Taha Yasseri et al., article on edit wars in Wikipedia, selected pages.
- Selected Wikipedia edit-history and talk-page excerpts prepared by the seminar leaders.
WED, OCT 28
Week 4: Reading Wikipedia Linguistically: Corpus Methods and Terminological Analysis for Non-Specialists
Hosted on Zoom
Suggested Readings
- Tony McEnery and Andrew Hardie, Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice, selected introductory pages.
- Maria Teresa Cabré, selected excerpt on terminology and specialized knowledge.
- Paul Baker, selected excerpt on corpus-assisted discourse analysis.
- Short handout prepared by the seminar leaders: “How to Read Wikipedia as Data.”
WED, NOV 4
Week 5: Cultural Heritage in Conflict-Affected Regions: Naming, Attribution, and Ownership
Hosted on Zoom
Suggested Readings
- Selected Wikipedia article and talk-page excerpts on a contested heritage site.
- Selected short texts on heritage protection and documentation in conflict-affected regions.
- Case materials prepared by the seminar leaders from Ukraine and the South Caucasus.
WED, NOV 11
Week 6: War, Language, and Digital Memory
Hosted on Zoom
Suggested Readings
- Serhii Plokhy, selected pages on Ukraine and historical memory.
- Selected Wikipedia article and talk-page excerpts on a war-related memory topic.
- Astrid Erll, selected excerpt on memory in culture.
- Short comparative case packet prepared by the seminar leaders.
WED, NOV 18
Week 7: Gendered Erasure: Women, Notability, and Digital Visibility
Hosted on Zoom
Suggested Readings
- Siân Evans et al., “Editing for Equality: The Outcomes of the Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thons,” selected pages.
- Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” selected excerpt.
- Wikipedia, “Notability,” selected excerpts.
- Selected examples of gender-related Wikipedia notability discussions.
WED, NOV 25
Week 8: Diaspora, Minority Memory, and the Limits of “Reliable Sources”
Hosted on Zoom
Suggested Readings
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, selected pages.
- Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice, selected pages.
- Selected diaspora, Indigenous, or minority heritage article/talk-page excerpts.
- Roopika Risam, selected excerpt on postcolonial digital humanities.
WED, DEC 2
Week 9: From Wikipedia to AI: How Contested Knowledge Travels
Hosted on Zoom
Suggested Readings
- Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression, selected pages.
- Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI, selected pages.
- Short article or excerpt on Wikipedia as a source for AI and search systems.
- Selected examples of Wikipedia-derived knowledge in search, knowledge panels, or automated summaries.
WED, DEC 9
Week 10: Digital Resistance: Repair, Documentation, and Knowledge Justice
Hosted on Zoom
Suggested Readings
- Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds, selected pages.
- Marisa Duarte, Network Sovereignty, selected pages.
- Kim Gallon, selected excerpt on Black digital humanities and recovery work.
- Final reflection packet prepared by the seminar leaders.
Certificates of Satisfactory Completion
Participants who attend 8 out of 10 complete seminar sessions are eligible to receive a Certificate of Satisfactory Completion signed by the Dean of The New School for Social Research.