Multilingual historical narratives on Wikipedia

Portrayals of history are never complete, and each description inherently exhibits a specific view-
point and emphasis. In this work, we automatically identified such differences by computing time-
lines and detecting temporal focal points of written history across languages on Wikipedia. In
particular, we studied articles related to the history of all UN member states and compared them in
30 language editions. We developed a computational approach that allows to identify focal points
quantitatively, and found that Wikipedia narratives about national histories (i) are skewed towards
more recent events (recency bias) and (ii) are distributed unevenly across the continents with sig-
nificant focus on the history of European countries (Eurocentric bias). Thus, our work explored
how colonial ties shape popular historiography on Wikipedia. We also established that national
historical timelines vary across language editions, although average interlingual consensus is rather
high. We hope that this work provides a starting point for a broader computational analysis of
written history on Wikipedia and elsewhere.