World Heritage sites on Wikipedia: Cultural heritage activism in a context of constrained agency

Wikipedia as a context of heritage production

We present a study of how people engage with elements of the past in one of the largest and long-lived online peer production communities, the English-language Wikipedia. Originating in 2001, this is a highly influential and well-known online encyclopedia, that anyone can edit, with nine billion page views per month as of September 2020 (https://stats.wikimedia.org/#/en.wikipedia.org). Although anyone can edit, most internet users do not. Factors that strongly predict if a user has ever edited Wikipedia include their gender (male), age (younger), education level (has BA), Internet use frequency (higher), and Internet use skills (higher) (Adams and Brückner, 2015; Ford and Wajcman, 2017; Hill and Shaw, 2013; Shaw and Hargittai, 2018). There are also geographical disparities. Articles about rural areas have systematically lower quality, are less likely to have been produced by contributors who focus on the local area, and are more likely to have been generated by bots (automated software agents) (Johnson et al., 2016). These studies indicate that participation in online peer production communities often follow existing patterns of social exclusion. Graham et al. (2014) examined the global distribution of 3.4 million geotagged Wikipedia articles and find a pattern of places in the Global North being represented in local languages, while articles about places in the Global South are largely being written by others.

An additional consideration for understanding participation in online peer production communities are the technical schemas of MediaWiki, the software that Wikipedia runs on. This is a complex toolkit that enables participation in Wikipedia in highly structured ways. On one hand, these structured behaviors produce structured datasets that are well suited to data science methods for efficient computational analysis of large numbers Wikipedia articles. On the other hand, they constrain and limit the agency of the user, canalizing their behavior into a small number of possible actions and acceptable modes of discourse and engagement with other users (Iba et al., 2010). While Wikipedia has elements that are ubiquitous on the Internet, such as links that take the user to other articles or pages on the Internet, it also has several less common elements that contribute to its unique technicity, resulting in specific types of relationships between human users and the technical elements of the Wikipedia project (Niederer and Van Dijck, 2010; Weltevrede and Borra, 2016). For example, every edit to an article is tracked in a publicly accessible version control system associated with that article. This exposes the article creation process in highly granular detail; for any given article, we can see how many editors contributed, the size of their edits and their distribution over time, among other things (Priedhorsky et al., 2007). Wikipedia has a special category of edit called the “revert” which allows a user to restore an article to an earlier state to remove recent vandalism (such as the addition of irrelevant or offensive material). This special revert action, combined with a “talk” page attached to each encyclopedia article for threaded discussion among editors, allows us to detect and study the social dynamics arising from the creation and editing of articles, for example, the controversiality of an article (Suh et al., 2007; Yasseri et al., 2012). While articles themselves must be written to conform to the fundamental Wikipedia policy of Neutral Point Of View (NPOV), the talk page is where different views are expressed and negotiated among editors.

In addition to the human users and the technological system that enables and constrains their activities on Wikipedia, there is an important third element of the ecosystem that contributes to Wikipedia’s uniqueness: the bots. Wikipedia bots are computer scripts that automatically handle repetitive and mundane tasks to develop, improve, and maintain the encyclopedia (Zheng et al., 2019). While bots are not unique to Wikipedia, they are important contributors and are responsible for a large proportion of edits (Geiger, 2009, 2014; Niederer and Van Dijck, 2010). They also evolve and autonomously engage in complex interactions with other bots to modify the encyclopedia (Geiger and Halfaker, 2017; Tsvetkova et al., 2017).

Contentious UNESCO World Heritage cultural sites

We investigate how the unique technicity of Wikipedia shapes interactions between people and the past with a case study of cultural sites inscribed on the WHL. We chose the CS-WHL as a bounded set of cultural heritage elements with several characteristics that make it of general interest. It has a global geographic distribution; broad public interest at local and international scales, in both online and face-to-face communities; a wide temporal distribution in both the age of the cultural sites, the ages of inscription on the WHL, and the ages of their appearance on Wikipedia; and finally, many CS-WHL have a high intensity of cultural and political discussions that surround events affecting these sites, such as their inscription on the WHL. These qualities make it an ideal data set as an entry point for case studies of digital heritage in online peer production communities, where activities are typically goal-driven (e.g. “write quality articles”) compared to social media activity where user activities are more often event-driven (e.g. “share reactions to Brexit”).

UNESCO was established in 1945, shortly after the end of the Second World War, for the purpose of helping to rebuild after the war and preserve peace by promoting the international exchange of ideas. In 1975, the UNESCO-drafted “Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage” came into force and established the WHL to protect natural and cultural sites and landscapes around the world that have outstanding universal value. As of September 2020, there are 869 cultural properties on the UNESCO WHL, with the first sites inscribed in 1978. On average, most countries have two to three sites, with most sites located in Italy and Western Europe, and several countries having no sites at all, for example, several central African countries, Taiwan, and New Zealand (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Cultural sites on the UNESCO WHL as of September 2020. Countries colored black have no listed cultural sites at the time of writing. Inset shows the distribution of sites per country. Map data from naturalearthdata.com.

Several CS-WHL sites are notable for the conflicts and tensions that have surrounded their inscription (Meskell, 2018). The 1992 inscription of Angkor (an ancient city and empire in Cambodia, prominent during the 9th to the 15th centuries AD) was encouraged by exiled supporters of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, hoping to strengthen territorial claims (Locard, 2015). They appropriated Western discourse on national cultural heritage to argue for the safeguarding of Angkor as part of their quest for national independence and international recognition. Early in the Khmer Rouge regime, Angkor was declared a symbol of enslavement by a primitive culture, but when the Khmer Rouge adopted a new rhetoric of a supposedly civilizing mission, they presented it as the site one of the great world civilizations (Falser, 2015). The 2003 inscription of Mapungubwe (the site of the first indigenous kingdom in Southern Africa, 900–1300 AD) was preceded by a recommendation from ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites, a professional association that is a key advisory body to the World Heritage Committee) not to inscribe because of the farming and mining activity in highly sensitive areas near the site and the unclear ownership of the mining rights at the time (Meskell, 2011). Despite this negative recommendation, geopolitical machinations within the Committee, especially by the Indian and Russian delegates, led to Mapungubwe being inscribed on the list, although without the typical prerequisites of a management plan or complete buffer zone (Meskell, 2012). These examples of Angkor and Mapungubwe demonstrate the attention that the WHL inscription process can generate due to political activism, conflicts, and intrigue.

Physical conflicts at or near CS-WHL are major events that also galvanize public interest in these locations. World Heritage sites in Palestine, Mali, Syria, Congo, and Cambodia have recently been sites of violence, in many cases, specifically linked to their potential WHL nomination, listing, or management. In 1998, anti-government and mostly Hindu Tamil groups bombed the holy Buddhist site of the Temple of the Tooth at the WHL site of Kandy (the last capital of the ancient kings of Sri Lanka), killing 17 people and substantially damaging the temple (Coningham and Lewer, 1999). In Mali, during 2012, fighting between government and rebel groups lead to the damage and destruction of tombs at the CS-WHL sites of Gao and Timbuktu (Brioschi, 2017). The World Heritage Committee found itself powerless to intervene because of political gridlock (Meskell, 2015), and these Mali sites are among the 53 cultural sites on the List of World Heritage in Danger, as of March 2021 (https://whc.unesco.org/en/danger/). In 2015, ISIS militants destroyed the Temple of Bel in Palmyra, Syria (a CS-WHL site of monumental ruins, once great city at the crossroads between east and west in the ancient world) (Gornik, 2015). Preah Vihear, inscribed in 2008, is a CS-WHL located on a long-disputed section of the Thai–Cambodia border that has been a site of both violent military clashes and international political intrigue. Although both Thailand and Cambodia supported the nomination of the site to the WHL, the Thai government objected to maps in the nomination package that showed Cambodia as the owner of disputed land next to the temple, leading to protests and military clashes (Sothirak, 2013). US diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks reveal that settlement of disputes over Preah Vihear were intricately tied to broader issues of foreign policy and US and Chinese investment, especially access to natural gas reserves in the Gulf of Thailand (Meskell, 2016).

Reproducibility and open source materials

We collected data during May 2019, and due to the highly dynamic nature of Wikipedia, it is likely that articles in our study have subtly changed since our data collection, or that new ones have appeared. Our original code may no longer work on the most current version of Wikipedia without modification as the tables on Wikipedia articles continue to be modified by editors. Although we recognize that the fragility and temporally specific nature of our methods limits the reproducibility of our results, we include the entire R code (R Core Team, 2020) used for all the analysis and visualizations contained in this article in our compendium at http://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/AY27G to enable reuse of our materials and improve reproducibility and transparency (Marwick, 2017). Also in this version-controlled compendium are the raw data for all the results reported here. All of the figures and quantitative results presented here can be independently reproduced with the code and data in this repository. In our compendium, our code is released under the MIT license, our data as CC-0, and our figures as CC-BY to enable maximum reuse (for more details, see Marwick et al. (2018)).

Article content

Of the 869 cultural sites on the WHL at the time of writing, we found Wikipedia articles for 582. As a group, the basic details of content for CS-WHL Wikipedia articles differ little from a sample of 10,000 random Wikipedia articles (Figure 2). The scholarly nature of the articles, measured by the number of sources cited in the reference list per thousand words in the article body, has similar distributions for CS-WHL articles and random articles. The number of Wikilinks out from the target article to other Wikipedia articles are also similarly distributed for CS-WHL articles and random articles. The total number of words in a CS-WHL article is typically much higher than a random article, indicating that they receive more generative effort from editors than other articles.

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Figure 2.

Content of Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL. The density plots show the distributions of basic content characteristics of Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL (yellow) compared to 10,000 random Wikipedia articles (grey).

Article production

Although details of content of CS-WHL articles are similar to our random sample, variables related to the production of Wikipedia articles on CS-WHL differ in important ways from other articles (Figure 3). The number of edits per thousand words, or edit density, and the number of unique editors per thousand words, or editor density, are substantially higher for CS-WHL articles. This tells us that CS-WHL articles are intensively word-smithed by a more diverse community of editors than for other articles. The absolute size of edits (i.e. additions or removals of text) is about the same for CS-WHL articles as other articles. The involvement of bots in producing CS-WHL articles is also about the same as for other articles. Bot activity is most intense on shorter, low-profile CS-WHL articles; in Figure 3, the labeled points are sites where bots have done >30% of edits. The most active bot on CS-WHL articles is Cluebot NG (vandalism detection and reverting) compared to Cydebot (automatic implementation of category deletions) for the random articles. The AnomieBOT, which performs clerical duties in an article’s reference list, is highly active on CS-WHL articles compared to random articles. Most bot edits on CS-WHL articles are in the fixer, tagger, connector, and clerk roles (Zheng et al., 2019). None of these articles with intensive bot activity are CS-WHL sites of conflict or on the List of World Heritage in Danger, indicating that these sites receive little or no vandalism.

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Figure 3.

Production of Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL. The top row of density plots show the distributions of basic article production characteristics of Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL (yellow) compared to 10,000 random Wikipedia articles (grey). The density plots on the lower left show the distribution of edits made by bots. The lower right shows a scatterplot of production-by-bot metrics for Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL and includes labels on the articles where bots were responsible for >30% of edits. Inset on the scatterplot shows the number of edits for the top ten bots in our sample.

For the special “revert” edit type, we see that the proportion of all edits per CS-WHL articles is similar to other articles, but has a left-skewed distribution indicating a higher number of articles that have few revert edits (Figure 4). We also identified edits with the string “vandal” in the edit summary as a similar type of edit to the revert edit, e.g., “Edits by 72.49.241.71 identified as vandalism.” CS-WHL articles generally have fewer edits about vandalism than our random sample. The shape of the distribution of edits about vandalism has a smaller second mode to the left of the peak, indicating that a large number of CS-WHL articles have few edits about vandalism (Figure 4). Among the CS-WHL articles that have high proportions of reverts and edits about vandalism are highly iconic sites in the Western canon of culture history, e.g., the Sydney Opera House, the Tower of London, and the Statue of Liberty (cf. Harrison, 2013). In reviewing a sample of several hundred reverted edits for each of these, we found that nearly all of them are undoing the addition of short strings of text (e.g. profanities, spam, and nonsense). Much of this vandalism is playful, in the spirit of “‘I am’, a statement that one is present and alive”, as Baker (2003) described historical graffiti on the Reichstag in Germany by Russian soldiers in the Second World War. Once again, of the CS-WHL sites with a history of conflict or on the in-danger list, only Timbuktu appears here as having high proportions of revert and vandalism-reversing edits.

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Figure 4.

Reverted edits and edits about vandalism in Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL. The top row of density plots show the distributions of proportions of edits relating to vandalism, and the proportion of revert edits in Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL (yellow) compared to 10,000 random Wikipedia articles (grey). The scatterplots below show reverted edits and edits about vandalism metrics for Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL and include labels on the articles with high proportions of these types of edits.

Talk pages are an important locus of article production activity where we expect to see conflicts and debates unfold on Wikipedia. Wikipedia talk pages are a popular subject of investigations to understand the collaborative generation of knowledge, and online conflict management (Ho-Dac et al., 2016, 2017; Kittur et al., 2007; Schneider, Passant and Breslin, 2012). Yasseri et al. (2012) has shown that the length of an article’s talk page is correlated with the controversality of the article and thus an effective simple proxy for conflict. We counted the words on all talk pages of the CS-WHL articles to identify conflict (Figure 5). Talk pages for CS-WHL articles tend to be much longer than other articles, which we expect due to the CS-WHL articles themselves being generally longer than other articles. However, the distribution of talk page lengths for CS-WHL articles has a long right tail, indicating that a higher number of articles have long talk pages compared to other articles. Some of these articles with long talk pages, such as Cologne Cathedral and Troy, have clear evidence of conflict among the editors in the contents of the text. However, close reading of the discussions on these talk pages reveals that these debates are dominated by technical issues of article production rather than conflicts and tensions at the CS-WHL or surrounding their inscription. For example, the Cologne Cathedral talk page includes some debate about the correct calculation of the interior volume of the structure, and the Troy talk page includes heated comments by one editor about the removal of unsourced claims and unencyclopedic prose.

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Figure 5.

Scatterplot showing the length of each CS-WHL article and the length of each article’s talk page. Labeled points are articles where the talk page is longer than the article. Inset shows the distribution of talk page lengths for CS-WHL articles and 10,000 random articles.

The talk page for Mapungubwe, which is longer than the article itself, is lengthy with expressions of concern about the accuracy of information in the article. In particular, editors were concerned about the depiction of Indigenous people, especially the degree to which early European colonists were aware of Indigenous communities and the correct cultural affiliation of the Indigenous groups that originally occupied the site. In this remarkable case, we see the Wikipedia editors engaging in conflicts that go beyond the typical technical details of article production. What is especially notable about these discussions on the talk page is how closely they echo the debates of land ownership that complicated the WHC process (Meskell, 2011). The specific editors involved in this debate did not make any edits to the article itself, which raises questions about their motivations for engaging in debate on the talk page, since they do not seem personally invested in the content of the article. Without directly interviewing these editors, we cannot be sure of their motives for participating in the talk page.

A second important example of conflict on a talk page is the article about Preah Vihear Temple. Although not notable for the length of its talk page, the discussions among editors of the article about Preah Vihear Temple include a strongly worded disagreement among seven editors about the legitimacy of the ownership claims by Thailand and Cambodia of the territory that includes the temple. As for Mapungubwe, the debate among Wikipedia editors here mirrors closely the political tensions surrounding the nomination of Preah Vihear. The talk page also has a lengthy argument from July to October 2008, involving several editors, about whether or not the Thai name of the site should be included in the text of the article. The editors appear to be people of Thai and Khmer heritage, with comments that personalize the national tensions such as “we invaded you,” and references to contemporary political tensions such as the 2008 street demonstrations in Thailand that saw conflict between the royalist People’s Alliance for Democracy and the populist People’s Power Party. One editor indicates their likely Thai ethnicity here through their use of Thai language phrases (using the Thai alphabet). This debate also recapitulates broader substantive issues of whether Thailand or Cambodia has the stronger claim for ownership of the temple. Amid accusations of nationalism among the editors, one of them asks “Can we put aside politics and be more collaborative on the encyclopedia project?” and appeals to Wikipedia’s policies of “Third opinion” and “Dispute resolution” to diffuse the tensions and refocus attention on the common goal. Unlike the Mapungubwe talk page, many of the editors involved in the Preah Vihear talk page debates have made contributions directly to the Preah Vihear article and are deeply invested in how the article represents the site.

Article consumption

The basic metrics of consumption of CS-WHL articles show substantial differences from our sample of random articles (Figure 6). We measure consumption by counting the total number of views of the article over the 100 days prior to our data collection date and the number of Wikilinks from other articles into the target article. Wikipedia article view counts are popular widely used measures of cultural interest or salience (Cao et al., 2020; McIver and Brownstein, 2014; Roll et al., 2016). Wikilinks from other articles are a measure of the centrality of an article, if many other articles link to it, then the article is well-integrated into the encyclopedia and viewed as important for supporting information presented in other articles. CS-WHL articles are typically viewed far more frequently than other Wikipedia articles, reflecting high consumption by internet users generally. They are also much more often linked to by other Wikipedia articles than our random sample of other articles, indicating consumption by other Wikipedia articles and Wikipedia users in their editing work (Figure 6). This indicates that consumption of CS-WHL articles is generally high, relative to other articles, and confirms our assertion of Wikipedia as an important source of heritage information. But how is attention distributed across all CS-WHL articles, and how does it relate to sites with conflicts and tensions?

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Figure 6.

Consumption of Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL. The density plots on the top show basic characteristics of consumption for Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL (yellow) compared to 10,000 random Wikipedia articles (grey). The scatterplot at the bottom shows consumption metrics for Wikipedia articles about CS-WHL, with labels on the most intensively consumed articles.

We can see an answer to this question in the scatterplot on the lower part of Figure 6, which shows the values of inward Wikilinks, article views, and article word count for all CS-WHL articles. The labeled points in the upper right quadrant are the articles that receive most of the attention. As noted above for sites with high proportions of reverts and edits, highly iconic sites in the Western canon of culture history are also the majority of sites that are highly consumed. Of the CS-WHL notable for conflict and tension, only Timbuktu is visible among these highly popular articles. It is also the only site on the List of World Heritage in Danger that is among these highly popular articles. We reviewed the talk page for the Timbuktu article to determine if the attention received by the article might relate to the issues leading to armed conflict at the site. Of the 6162 words on the talk page, only 168 are on the topic of conflict and destruction, with the editors discussing how to describe the scale of the damage to the temples. The majority of talk page content for Timbuktu is about filling in missing detail, suggestions for, or notifications of minor corrections. This is also the case for the talk page for Auschwitz, another popular CS-WHL article with six archived talk pages including over 100,000 words. Although Wikipedia articles in other languages on Auschwitz have different points of emphasis (Wolniewicz-Slomka, 2016), the majority of the discussion among editors on the talk pages is technical and precise. Provocative comments on the English language Auschwitz talk pages, for example, by editors denying the Holocaust, usually end after brief exchanges with other editors requesting credible sources. The rarity of conflict on the Auschwitz talk page can be contrasted with the talk page for the Holocaust, where Pfanzelter (2015) found abundant evidence of conflict among editors. Generally, our results show that conflict and tension at a CS-WHL are not highly correlated with how much attention an article receives.

Spatial patterns

Spatial patterns in the coverage of CS-WHL sites on Wikipedia closely resemble the physical distribution of sites. Figure 7 shows that most countries have between 2 and 3 CS-WHL on Wikipedia with Germany, India, China, France, and Spain being the countries with the most articles about their CS-WHL. This pattern is consistent with Graham et al. (2014)’s observations that places in the Global North tend to be over-represented on Wikipedia. We also see that some Asian countries outside of the Global North are highly represented on Wikipedia (e.g. India and China). The lower panel of Figure 7 further demonstrates this with South American countries having low proportions of their CS-WHL sites represented on Wikipedia. The pattern for African countries is that they either have a very small number of sites that are all on Wikipedia (indicated by yellow on the figure) or they do not have any CS-WHL.

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Figure 7.

Wikipedia articles for Cultural Sites on the UNESCO WHL. Upper panel shows the total number of Wikipedia articles for CS-WHL sites per country. Lower panel is the proportion of all CS-WHL sites that have Wikipedia articles per country. Inset shows the distribution of numbers of CS-WHL articles per country. Countries colored black have no CS-WHL with Wikipedia articles at the time of writing. Map data from naturalearthdata.com.

The distribution of editor locations shown in Figure 8 was determined by geolocating the IP addresses attached to each anonymous edit on all CS-WHL articles (only anonymous edits contain IP addresses, edits made by registered Wikipedia users contain no information suitable for geolocation). This figure shows the flow of edits, with the arrows starting at the country where the editor was located when they made their edit, and ending at the country where the CS-WHL site that they are editing is located. The inset plot on Figure 8 shows that this visualization accounts for a relatively small proportion of all edits to CS-WHL articles. Around 20% of edits of most CS-WHL articles are anonymous, a higher proportion than our random sample. Nevertheless, there are 79,077 anonymous edits, and so, this sample likely has some informational value in characterizing the spatial distribution of edits. The most striking detail in Figure 8 is the large proportion of edits that originate in the United States and that the vast majority of these are edits of articles about CS-WHL sites located elsewhere in the world. The country with the next largest proportion, the United Kingdom, is less than half of the United States, and a much greater proportion of edits originating in the UK are on articles about CS-WHL sites located in the UK compared to the US. After the United Kingdom is India, and nearly half of those edits are on CS-WHL sites located in the same country. Generally, articles about CS-WHL sites receive edits from editors located elsewhere, mostly, the US and other English-speaking countries.

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Figure 8.

Flow of edits by location on Wikipedia for articles about Cultural Sites on the UNESCO WHL. The arrows indicate the country where the editor is location (arrow nock or start) and the location of the CS-WHL site that they are editing the article of (arrow point or end). Editor locations were determined by geolocating the IP addresses associated with anonymous edits. Inset shows the distribution of proportions of edits per article that are anonymous. Non-anonymous edits are identified by Wikipedia usernames, rather than IP addresses, and cannot be geolocated.

Temporal patterns

Time series analysis of edits on articles about CS-WHL sites helps us identify relationships between activity on Wikipedia articles and external events related to the sites. Figure 9 shows that most articles about CS-WHL sites are much older than articles in our random sample, with most CS-WHL articles created 5–10 years after Wikipedia first appeared in 2001. This rapid addition of articles early in the life of Wikipedia supports our earlier observation that articles about CS-WHL sites are more central to the encyclopedia and considered more worthy of inclusion than many other types of articles. The distribution of years between the date of a site’s inscription on the WHL and the date of the creation of that site’s Wikipedia article has a distinctive trimodal shape. The first two modes reflect the relatively large number of sites inscribed on the WHL in 1983, and the early 1990s, well before Wikipedia was created in 2001. The third mode at the zero point on the horizontal axis corresponds to CS-WHL sites that were inscribed after the creation of Wikipedia and has Wikipedia articles that were created in or around the same year the CS-WHL site was inscribed on the list. Only a relatively small proportion of CS-WHL sites had Wikipedia articles created about them before they were inscribed on the WHL because the majority of sites were inscribed before Wikipedia was created.

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Figure 9.

Article editing relative to WHL inscription date. Upper panel is a histogram of WHL inscription years. Lower panel is a histogram of duration between inscription and the appearance of the Wikipedia article. Inset shows the distribution of CS-WHL article ages and ages of random sites.

The time series of editing activity at individual sites are highly variable and display complex patterns (Figure 10). Timbuktu shows spikes of editing activity right after the rebel attacks in mid June 2012, with descriptions of the attacks added to the text of the article at that time. However, the tallest peak in editing activity on the Timbuktu occurs slightly earlier, in April 2012, with numerous edits concentrated on expanding the sections on local prehistory. A detailed analysis of all the article-specific time series is beyond the scope of this paper, but we can see several patterns indicating important relationships between editorial activities and WHL listing. For example, one pattern is of editing activity spiking sharply at the time of WHL inscription (e.g. Tyre, Masada), a second pattern is editorial activity peaking at the time of WHL inscription and slowly decaying to a baseline level (e.g. Carthage), a third pattern is editorial activity that is highest shortly after the time of WHL inscription (e.g. Troy, Masada), and finally many sites where editorial activity that shows no signal at all at the time of WHL inscription (Figure 10).

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Figure 10.

Time series of editing activity for CS-WHL articles for all sites inscribed after Wikipedia began in 2001 and with a minimum of 150 edits in total. Red vertical line indicates the time of inscription for each site.