How Australians are Represented in Wikipedia

Nationality, biography, Australianness: these are topics beset with complexities and politics before we even get to Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, further complexities arise. Even getting to the point of being able to map Wikipedia's representation over time requires understanding which biographies on Wikipedia refer to Australians. This involves further questions: who counts as Australian in Wikipedia and its sister-projects? How are Wikipedia articles or Wikidata items marked as 'Australian' by the system? How does Wikipedia define or represent 'Australianness'? 

In this report, we address these questions using a dataset of biographical articles culled from English Wikipedia with the aim of revealing the definition of 'Australianness' implicit in Wikipedia's systems and assessing how well Wikipedia represents the diversity of Australians. To address these questions and complexities, we used an innovative methodology which is explored in-depth in the report Appendix for all those data fiends out there.