History Writing and Wikipedia

How do Wikipedia articles about the same topic compare across languages? Previous Wikipedia articles in writing studies have examined revision practices (Jones, 2008), ethos building (Brown, 2009), and the potential and shortcomings (Purdy, 2009; Gruwell, 2015) in Wikipedia. This project analyzes three rhetorical aspects (the introduction/lead section, the organization of the article by way of Table of Contents, and source usage and citation) of the article “Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” as it has been composed in 6 different languages: English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Important findings are that the introductions and table of contents had important similarities but several notable differences, and the citation practices were very irregular and for the most part dominated by English language sources across the 6 different language versions. Finally, a case is made for the pedagogical importance of cross-language comparisons of Wikipedia.