Every piece of technology we use is also using us. All That We Touch looks at familiar tools, systems, and habits and asks, how do they shape us? Hear deeply reported narrative series, interviews, and live recordings on the entangled relationships between technology, society, nature and politics, like: - Wikipedia: A six-part investigation about what shapes the world's biggest encyclopedia, and how to use it better. - Liquid Gold: What happens after we flush? Tracing human waste from taboo to treasure. - NewGenics: The new frontier of embryo testing. What happens when the hope for a healthy child becomes the pressure to choose the best one? All That We Touch is hosted by historian Tamson Pietsch and Matt Ryan from the University of Technology Sydney, and made by the award-winning UTS Impact Studios.
Five questions. Two hosts. One deceptively simple quiz. Can Wikipedia articles really be edited by anyone? Does the site rely on your $5 donations, or is there more to the story? Host Heather Ford goes head-to-head with guest Simon Knight in a true-or-false showdown about Wikipedia. Almost nothing is as straightforward as it sounds. This is All That We Touch: Wikipedia, a documentary podcast series exploring what shapes the world's most-read encyclopaedia, and how to use it better. Every question in this episode comes the Wikimedia Foundation's 2025 Global Readers Survey , testing how well people understand the site they use every day. Play along and test your knowledge! Voices Heather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is a former Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation and the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press. Simon Knight is a member of the University of Technology Sydney Centre for Research on Education in a Digital Society (UTS: CREDS), and its founding Director. Dr Knight researches how people learn to navigate uncertainty, disagreement, and evidence, and the mediating role of technology in that. Quiz questions and more reading Quiz question #1 True or false? Wikipedia articles can be changed by anyone. You can and cannot change Wikipedia (Wikipedia) A community essay on editing, reverting edits, blocks and bans, page protection, oversight and deletion. Who writes Wikipedia? (Wikipedia) A community essay on the types of editors and the demographic skew of the volunteer base. Study reveals bot-on-bot editing wars raging on Wikipedia's pages (The Guardian, 2017) Over time, the encyclopedia’s software robots can become locked in combat, undoing each other’s edits and changing links, say researchers. Quiz question #2 True or false? Wikipedia articles must have pictures Wikimedia Commons A media file repository making available public domain and freely licensed educational media content (images, sound and video clips) to everyone, in their own language. Commons Courtesy: Reusing Creative Commons-licensed media is easier than you think by Joshua Leach (The Ink Tank blog, 2025) Quiz question #3 True or false? Wikipedia articles change over time Wikipedia at 25: What the data tells us (Pew Research Centre, 2026) Answers to some common questions about the site, based on data from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Statistics, including Which pages have been edited the most? And Which pages have had the most views or edits in a single day? An Encyclopedia with Breaking News by Brian Keegan (MIT Press, 2019) Wikipedia's unexpected ability to generate high-quality articles about current events is a critical part of its success story; Keegan offers lessons taken from this for addressing the sludge polluting other online platforms. The language geography of Wikipedia by Martin Dittus and Mark Graham (Oxford Internet Institute, 2022) Deaths in 2026 Wikipedia page Quiz question #4 True or false? The people who write Wikipedia articles are unpaid volunteers. Wikipedia How-To Guides for editors with a conflict of interest (The Ink Tank blog) How to properly request updates, whether adding a new logo, correcting errors, or handling disputes, without violating Wikipedia’s policies. Paid editors on Wikipedia: Should you be worried? (Kim Osman, The Conversation, 2014) Wikipedia:Conflict of interest/Paid contribution disclosure policy Quiz question #5 True or false? Wikipedia relies on donations to support its operations. How is Wikipedia funded? (Wikimedia Foundation, 2025) Fundraising statistics (Wikipedia, 2025) Credits The executive producer of this series is Heather Ford. The series is hosted by Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke. Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate producer is Francesa Sidoti. Sound by John Jacobs. Bell music composition by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary. Executive Producer of UTS Impact Studios is Sarah Gilbert. It’s produced on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia. wikihistories is supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP220100662 , ‘Wikipedia and the Nation’s Story: Towards Equity in Knowledge Production’. Find out more at wikihistories.net
In the future, will Wikipedia still be written by humans? This episode asks what happens to that promise as two very different futures close in. Co-host and author Richard Cooke calls Wikipedia ‘the last best place on the internet’ - one of the only things still standing from the early web's promise of a civic, collaborative internet. This episode traces two futures already taking shape. The first is AI. It might surprise you how long Wikipedia has used AI successfully. And unsuccessfully... Like in the strange true story of a Wikipedia language edition almost entirely about insects, written in Cebuano by one Swedish professor's bot, as a tribute to his wife. Now generative AI like ChatGPT is raising the stakes again. The second future is hiding in plain sight, on Wikipedia's own turf: an ambitious project to turn its millions of articles into structured, machine-readable facts that could be translated into any language, instantly. A utopian dream - or the thing that replaces human editors? Voices Heather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is a former Advisory Board member of the Wikimedia Foundation and the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press. Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ARC Discovery project ‘Wikipedia and the nation’s story: towards equity in knowledge production’ in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Richard Cooke is an author, reporter and screenwriter. The author of three books, he is the former US correspondent and current contributing editor to The Monthly magazine. His latest book is The Last Best Place On The Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia . Dr Michael Falk is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne, and is a computational literary scholar, data scientist, speaker and writer. In all his work, he aims to combine the creativity of the arts with the rigour and precision of data science. Josh Lim a long-time Wikipedia editor, and the founder of Wikimedia Philippines. He speaks seven languages and works as a community manager. He has a strong interest in studying the dynamics of tech communities, particularly on the Wikimedia projects but also at large. Research Falk, Michael. ‘Wikilambda the Ultimate: The Wikimedia Foundation’s Search for the Perfect Language’. AI & SOCIETY, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-02899-w . In 2020 the Wikimedia foundation launched its first new project in nearly a decade, and includes Abstract Wikipedia, a language-agnostic Wikipedia that will be dynamically translated into the reader’s native tongue. The project is designed to address a fundamental bias in Wikipedia, namely its bias towards majority languages such as English and Spanish. More reading 'Wikipedia Warriors' List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia (Wikipedia) EFF Launches New Offline Campaign for Saudi Wikipedian Osama Khalid by Jillian C. York (Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2026) Wiki warriors: activists fighting to keep truth of brutal Marcos regime in Philippines alive (The Guardian, 2017) The last best place The Last Best Place on the Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia by Richard Cooke (Black Inc Books, 2026) Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet by Richard Cooke (Wired, 2020) How Wikipedia became the responsible adult of the internet by Stephen Harrison (Australian Financial Review, 2019) Peer production Here Comes Everybody: How change happens when people come together by Clay Shirky (Penguin, 2009) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler (Yale University Press, 2006) Wikipedia and AI Wikipedia bans AI-generated content in its online encyclopedia (The Guardian, 2026) Breathe, Don’t Panic, there is a different story about Wikimedia + AI futures by Sadads (The Signpost, 2026) Wikipedia goes to war against AI slop articles with new deletion policy (PC World, 2025) Vandalism on Wikipedia (Wikipedia) Cebuano Wikipedia Wikipedia's largest non-English version was created by a bot. Generative AI poses new problems (ABC, 2025) Cebuano Wikipedia, a large language edition Wikipedia finally has a WikiClub! (Wikimedia 2024) Wikidata Teaching Wikipedia to write itself by Rebecca J. Rosen (The Atlantic, 2012) Abstract Wikipedia WikiLambda the Ultimate by e mln e and Tilman Bayer (The Signpost, 2026) Some reflections on designing Abstract Wikipedia so far by Maria Keet (Keet blog, 2023)
Wikipedia promised to be the sum of all human knowledge. Then the fighting started. Host Heather Ford and writer Richard Cooke walk through three of Wikipedia's biggest fight. Not the daily edit wars over the spelling of yoghurt, but the fights over what Wikipedia is, and whose knowledge gets to be part of it. There are more than 300 language versions of Wikipedia. So why does everyone treat the English one as the real one? A game played by millions of people can't get a Wikipedia page. And two warring camps of editors, with very nerdy names, quietly decide what deserves to exist on Wikipedia. One side almost always wins. Three fights. All of them shaping what you learn from the world's biggest encyclopedia. Voices Heather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press. Richard Cooke is an author, reporter and screenwriter. The author of three books, he is the former US correspondent and current contributing editor to the The Monthly magazine. His latest book is The Last Best Place On The Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia . Achal Prabhala is a writer, researcher, and activist based in Bangalore, India, whose work spans two decades and two intersecting causes: access to medicines in the Global South, and the politics of knowledge. Prabhala runs the AccessIBSA project, which is an inter-disciplinary campaign for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa. He served on the Wikimedia Foundation's advisory board from 2006 and was an advisor on the Whose Knowledge? campaign . Florence Devouard is a speaker and independent digital strategy consultant, and she facilitate the discovery of and participation in Wikimedia projects through conferences, seminars, and training sessions on wiki software, Wikipedia, online communities, collaboration, and knowledge management. In 2006 she was President of the Wikimedia Foundation. Since 2008, she has served on the Wikimedia Foundation's Advisory Board. Research links Opening Indigenous games Australian Government: Australian Sports Commission Fight #1 English Wikipedia as the ‘invisible centre’ WikiGap: Promoting Epistemic Equity by Surfacing Knowledge Gaps Between English Wikipedia and other Language Editions (arXiv 2025) argues that although Wikipedia is architecturally multilingual and aspires to provide knowledge to "every single person on the planet in their own language," its design and community practices systematically privilege English content, and at the interface level this dynamic obscures cross-linguistic differences. How is Wikipedia funded? (Wikimedia Foundation 2025) Wikipedia is funded primarily through single or monthly donations from millions of individuals around the world. Each year, around 2,000 individuals and institutions make donations of above $1,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation. Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age (MIT Press 2022) An extended case study by Heather Ford of English Wikipedia functioning as the venue where the globally authoritative account of a non-Anglophone event, the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, gets negotiated. “What an un-wiki way of doing things”: Wikipedia’s multilingual policy and metalinguistic practice ( 2011) Wikipedia defines itself as "the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopaedia on the internet," making an explicit language policy part of its mission statement. Astrid Ensslin argues that when you critically examine what Wikipedia actually does, its policies, its interface, its symbols, its community practices, this multilingual self-image conceals a deeply Anglo-centric structure. Fight #2 Oral citations Oral Citations project on Wikipedia Ethnographies of the Digitally Dispossessed (In The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology 2022) A book chapter describing the oral citations project and its ethnographic study by Heather Ford. Possible Enlightenments: Wikipedia’s Encyclopedic Promise and Epistemological Failure (MIT Press 2019) Wikipedia challenges traditional notions of expertise, authorship, access, and transparency. It also conserves features of the genre that characterize its emergence from western Enlightenment logic. Given Wikipedia's maturity, Matthew Vetter asks how do we understand this contradiction? When Knowledge Isn’t Written, Does It Still Count? (New York Times 2011) Fight #3 Inclusionists vs Deletionists Representation and the problem of bibliographic imagination on Wikipedia (Luyt 2021). A history of the inclusionist versus deletionist debate, how it influenced the representation of the Phillippine-American War on Wikipedia, and exarcerbated representational gaps on the platform. The Missing Wikipedians (In Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader 2012) An early discussion of the cultures of deletionism in the context of African topics (using a case study of Makmende, the Kenyan internet meme on Wikipedia) by Heather Ford. Wikipedia approaches its limits (The Guardian 2009) The online encyclopaedia is about to hit 3m articles in English – but growth is stalling as 'inclusionists' and 'deletionists' fight for control. Further reading and watching People are Knowledge documentary by Achal Prabhala (Vimeo 2011) Interview with Achal Prabhala (The Believer 2014) Writer and activist Achal Prabhala on expanding the parameters for what is considered knowledge (Bubblegum Club 2018) Wikipedia and the Crisis of Knowledge Equity by Jake Orlowitz (Medium 2026) Clips 9/11 news montage (YouTube 2001) Creative Commons Summit 2021: Keynote by Achal Prabhala (YouTube 2021) Credits The executive producer of this series is Heather Ford. The series is hosted by Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke. Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate producer is Francesa Sidoti. Story consultant is Rachael Cusick. Sound by John Jacobs. Bell music composition by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary. Executive Producer of UTS Impact Studios is Sarah Gilbert. It’s produced on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia. wikihistories is supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP220100662 , ‘Wikipedia and the Nation’s Story: Towards...
Wikipedia doesn't set out to play favourites. But when a made-up Melbourne suburb has more history than real Australian places, something is shaping what gets written. Who - or what - decides which Australian places matter on Wikipedia? Hosts Heather Ford and Francesca Sidoti go looking, through a map of 35,000 places, a street corner in Penrith, and a fight over one island's name. How is Wikipedia biased, and why? The answer will surprise you. Voices Heather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is the author of “Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age” published by MIT Press. Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ARC Discovery project ‘Wikipedia and the nation’s story: towards equity in knowledge production’ in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dr Michael Falk is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne, and is a computational literary scholar, data scientist, speaker and writer. In all his work, he aims to combine the creativity of the arts with the rigour and precision of data science. Research links Australian places and Wikipedia Map of Australian places on Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025) Map showing Edit intensity of Australian place articles: English Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025) Full report: How Australian places are represented on Wikipedia (Wikihistories: 2025) We analysed 35,000 Wikipedia entries about Australian places. Some of them sanitise history (The Conversation: 2024) Erinsborough Wikipedia Page Penrith Wikipedia page K'gari Wikipedia page Bias and Wikipedia Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past by Roy Rosenzweig (The Journal of American History Volume 2006) Wikipedia's known unknowns (The Guardian 2009) The earliest geographical analyses of Wikipedia’s geographical biases is described Professor Mark Graham. ‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap ( Social Studies of Science 2017) How Wikipedia’s infrastructure introduces new and less visible sources of gender disparity, by Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman. Who Gets To Be Notable And Who Doesn't: Gender Bias On Wiki (NPR All Things Considered 2021) On Wikipedia, gender inequality is hiding in plain sight. Of more than a million and a half biographies - that's on the English-language version - fewer than 19% are about women. A recent study by Francesca Tripodi brings some new insight into why that is. Demographic disparity in Wikipedia coverage: a global perspective (EPJ Data Sci. 2025)Even though people identifying as female and non-binary genders have been better represented in terms of the number of Wikipedia language editions over time, and they are currently better covered than males, current global coverage of people on Wikipedia still shows disparities in both gender and geographical location of biographical subjects in various dimensions. Wikipedia editors Who is contributing to Wikimedia projects? (Wikimedia Foundation, nd) The Wikipedia “Change the Stats” page that collates research into the Wikipedia editor base as a baseline for increasing the diversity of Wikipedia editors. Community Insights Report (Wikimedia Foundation, 2020) A survey with 2500 Wikimedians looking at their demographics, social and technological experiences. Findings from the survey included: Wikimedia contributors are 87% male. Almost half live in Europe and one-fifth in Northern America, as compared to 9.7% and 4.8% of the global population. Fewer than 1% of Wikipedia’s editor base in the U.S. identify as Black or African American. Although women were still markedly underrepresented among contributors, there was a modest increase in women contributors between 2019 (11.5%) and 2020 (15.0%). Further reading “ Finding Eliza: power and colonial storytelling” by Larissa Behrendt (2016) “ Finding Eliza” exhibition at Hervey Bay Regional Gallery until 16 August 2026 Clips Jimmy Wales on bias: Lex Fridman podcast 19 June 2023 Comedian Guy Williams on visiting Rottnest Island Herbs French Letter World Heritage Fraser Island officially restored to Indigenous name, K'gari, supported by public (ABC News 7 June 2023) Credits The executive producer of this series is Heather Ford. The series is hosted by Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke. Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate producer is Francesa Sidoti. Story consultant is Rachael Cusick. Sound by John Jacobs. Thanks for feedback from Sarah Gilbert, Regina Botros, Celine Teo-Blockey, Siobhan Moylan, Lachlan A Court, Zlata Maltceva, Rosa Ellen, and Kate Lawrence. All That We Touch artwork by Alexandra Morris. Episode tiles by Jane Curtis. Bell music composition by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary. Executive Producer of UTS Impact Studios is Sarah Gilbert. It’s produced on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia. wikihistories is supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP220100662 , ‘Wikipedia and the Nation’s Story: Towards Equity in Knowledge Production’. Find out more at wikihistories.net Transcripts Wikipedia and Australia: the bias in the map Transcript Word doc Wikipedia and Australia: the bias in the map Transcript PDF
It started as a joke. An encyclopedia anyone could edit? Now it’s one of the ten most visited websites in the world. Even when you think you're not using it, you probably are. It's feeding your search results, your voice assistant, your AI chatbot. But if Wikipedia shapes how we understand the world, what shapes Wikipedia? Host Heather Ford, researcher Francesca Sidoti, and author Richard Cooke investigate the site and all that it touches. Episode 1 asks, what does Australia look like on Wikipedia? The answer takes you from a fictional soap-opera suburb to a dispute over what a place should be called. Episode 2 goes inside the three big fights that made Wikipedia what it is today. Episode 3 asks what its future holds, in the age of generative AI? Episode 4 is a True/False quiz with nuanced answers to simple questions. Episode 5 is for teachers and students wanting practical tips on how to research and teach with Wikipedia. Episode 6 is for Wikipedia editors wanting to share First Nations knowledge respectfully. All That We Touch: Wikipedia is produced by Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney . First episode coming soon. Follow now so you don't miss it. Voices Professor Heather Ford is an ARC Future Fellow and Professor in the School of Communication and Social Sciences at UTS. She is the author of “ Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age ” published by MIT Press. Dr Francesca Sidoti is a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the ARC Discovery project ‘Wikipedia and the nation’s story: towards equity in knowledge production’ in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Richard Cooke is an author, reporter and screenwriter. The author of three books, he is the former US correspondent and current contributing editor to The Monthly magazine . His latest book is The Last Best Place On The Internet: A Human History of Wikipedia . Research Top ten websites in the world by traffic in May 2026 : Semrush Credits The executive producer of this series is Heather Ford. It is hosted by Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti and Richard Cooke. Produced by Jane Curtis. Associate producer is Francesa Sidoti. Story consultant is Rachael Cusick. Sound by John Jacobs. Bell music composition by Maksim Voloshin-Cleary. Executive Producer of UTS Impact Studios is Sarah Gilbert. It’s produced on Gadigal Country in Sydney Australia. wikihistories is supported by Australian Research Council Grant DP220100662 , ‘Wikipedia and the Nation’s Story: Towards Equity in Knowledge Production’. wikihistories.net
