Mapping Nazi History: Charting Current Controversies About Hitler’s Regime through Digital Media

This project explores the representations of the Nazi regime in digital media today. By analyzing English Wikipedia pages related to Nazi Germany, we aim to examine this relationship in terms of discovering biases behind editors and editing trends. With the prevalence of digital media and technology in today’s society and information now at everyone’s fingertips, it is important that this information is represented truthfully and with no hint of personal bias or unsupported claims. This project is ongoing as new edits are continuously added and each edit we analyze breaks into different directions of research. Despite the inability to produce conclusive results, the project has already identified trends of Wikipedia editing, the types of editors on the Nazi Germany pages, and some reasons that pages are being changed. For example, we discovered extreme gender disparity among editors—no surprise since estimates suggest that 90% of Wikipedia editors are male. We have also detected cases of cyber bullying committed by men towards female editors, further skewing the perspectives of Wikipedia. In addition, we have encountered a suspected case of unauthorized use of multiple accounts by a single editor, as well as copyright violations that have gone unnoticed for years, on the Nazi-related Wikipedia pages. Our work is holding Wikipedia to its own fair standards in hopes to further present reliable information about the Nazi regime.