{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,29]],"date-time":"2026-04-29T09:30:57Z","timestamp":1777455057838,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":68,"publisher":"SAGE Publications","issue":"1","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2021,1,1]],"date-time":"2021-01-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1609459200000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-nc\/4.0\/"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["journals.sagepub.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Big Data &amp; Society"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2021,1]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>UNESCO World Heritage sites are places of outstanding significance and often key sources of information that influence how people interact with the past today. The process of inscription on the UNESCO list is complicated and intersects with political and commercial controversies. But how well are these controversies known to the public? Wikipedia pages on these sites offer a unique dataset for insights into public understanding of heritage controversies. The unique technicity of Wikipedia, with its bot ecosystem and editing mechanics, shapes how knowledge about cultural heritage is constructed and how controversies are negotiated and communicated. In this article, we investigate the patterns of production, consumption, and spatial and temporal distributions of Wikipedia pages for World Heritage cultural sites. We find that Wikipedia provides a distinctive context for investigating how people experience and relate to the past in the present. The agency of participants is highly constrained, but distinctive, behind-the-scenes expressions of cultural heritage activism are evident. Concerns about state-like actors, violence and destruction, deal-making, etc. in the World Heritage inscription process are present, but rare on Wikipedia\u2019s World Heritage pages. Instead, hyper-local and process issues dominate controversies on Wikipedia. We describe how this kind of research, drawing on Big Data and data science methods, contributes to digital heritage studies and also reveals its limitations.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/20539517211017304","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,5,26]],"date-time":"2021-05-26T14:15:34Z","timestamp":1622038534000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":12,"title":["World Heritage sites on Wikipedia: Cultural heritage activism in a context of constrained agency"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"8","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-7879-4531","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Ben","family":"Marwick","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-5485-359X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Prema","family":"Smith","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Anthropology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"179","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2021,5,26]]},"reference":[{"key":"bibr1-20539517211017304","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1177\/2053951715614332"},{"key":"bibr2-20539517211017304","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Baker F (2003) The red army graffiti in the Reichstag, Berlin: Politics of rock-art in a contemporary European urban landscape. 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In: Meskell L and Preucel RW (eds)\n                      A Companion to Social Archaeology\n                      , pp.335\u2013352.","DOI":"10.1002\/9780470693605.ch14"},{"key":"bibr411-20539517211017304","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Bonacchi C, Altaweel M and Krzyzanska M (2018) The heritage of Brexit: Roles of the past in the construction of political identities through social media.\n                      Journal of Social Archaeology\n                      18(2): 174\u2013192.","DOI":"10.1177\/1469605318759713"},{"key":"bibr4-20539517211017304","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1080\/13527258.2019.1578989"},{"key":"bibr5-20539517211017304","unstructured":"Brioschi G (2017)\n                      Discourses of heritage: UNESCO and the local community in Timbuktu\n                      . PhD Thesis. 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(2007) Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia. In: Gross T and Inkpen K (eds)\n                      Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on supporting group work\n                      , New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery, pp.259\u2013268.","DOI":"10.1145\/1316624.1316663"},{"key":"bibr47-20539517211017304","unstructured":"R Core Team (2020) R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Available at: https:\/\/www.R-project.org\/."},{"key":"bibr48-20539517211017304","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1353\/jod.2016.0061"},{"key":"bibr49-20539517211017304","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Richards E (2019) British emigrants and the making of the Anglosphere: Some observations and a case study. In: Payton P and Varnava A (eds) Australia, Migration and Empire: Immigrants in a Globalised World. 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(2007) Us vs. them: Understanding social dynamics in Wikipedia with revert graph visualizations. In:\n                      2007 IEEE symposium on visual analytics science and technology\n                      , NW Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society, 1730 Massachusetts Ave., pp.163\u2013170.","DOI":"10.1109\/VAST.2007.4389010"},{"key":"bibr59-20539517211017304","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.2307\/j.ctt7s1xk"},{"key":"bibr60-20539517211017304","first-page":"12","volume":"2","author":"Tsvetkova M","year":"2017","journal-title":"PloS One"},{"key":"bibr61-20539517211017304","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1515\/9780804777698"},{"key":"bibr62-20539517211017304","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1177\/2053951716653418"},{"key":"bibr63-20539517211017304","unstructured":"Wickham H (2019)\n                      Rvest: Easily harvest (scrape) web pages\n                      . 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