Wikipedia

As a part of Florida State’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), students Michela Sieman and Shelby Young were two among a group of research assistants who worked with Dr. Nathan Stoltzfus in fulfilling what he deemed as a project on current-day historical representations in digital media. The project explores the representations of the Nazi regime in digital media today. By analyzing English Wikipedia pages related to Nazi Germany, this project aims 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. 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. This work is holding Wikipedia to its own fair standards in hopes to further present reliable information about the Nazi regime. Through a year of communication and working in various settings, this research group was able to explore a research area as well as open up pathways of research for all parties involved.