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.