Please register for the CV & Online Identity Workshop below.

How history is told is perpetually contested, shaping how nations and people understand both their pasts and the current moment. Who and what from history gets recorded, and what is missing from our collective historical understanding? Wikipedia represents the largest attempt to summarize all human knowledge and is increasingly recognized as the global consensus view about people, places, events and things around the world, providing an opportunity to systematically analyze precisely what is included, and what is omitted, from our collective histories. Using women’s movements in the United States as a case study of a complex and debated historical field, we quantify Wikipedia’s recall, or the comprehensiveness of their coverage of this movement. Using primary documents from three sections of the women’s movement between 1899 and 1935 - a professional women’s organization, a working-class organization, and writings from Black women suffragists - we apply the phrase-mining RAKE algorithm to identify key phrases used by this movement, producing a “ground truth” of things and concepts that ought to be covered in Wikipedia. Using a contemporary snapshot of Wikipedia, we then examine which of these phrases are present in Wikipedia, if they appear in history articles, and whether there are systematic differences in coverage across these three subcollections. In doing so, we identify a typology of mechanisms leading to historical omissions: paucity, restrictive paradigms, and categorical narrowness. We discuss the implications for both historians and Wikipedia editors.