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Whose History We Keep: Benchmarking our Records of the Past’s Protagonists

  • Lennart Finke
  • Sarah Sophie Pohl
  • Luca Lukačević
  • Janek Große
  • Stefan Haas

Historical science compounds millennia of records of human activity, which have become available in digital, searchable form. Focusing on the largest such dataset—Wikidata—we attempt to find quantitative answers to the questions: Whose periods and which places' people do we know most about? What interests us about them? Who are we forgetting? What trends underlie the number of people registered and written about over time? We examine the individuals who have ended up in these datasets in relation to their readership, thereby shedding light not only on history itself but also on the practice of writing it.

  • Keywords:
  • digital history,
  • methodology of history,
  • Open Data,
  • Wikidata,
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Lennart Finke

ETH Zurich, Switzerland - ORCID: 0009-0003-6908-314X

Sarah Sophie Pohl

University of Göttingen, Germany

Stefan Haas

University of Göttingen, Germany

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  • Publication Year: 2026
  • Pages: 249-261
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2026 Author(s)

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  • Publication Year: 2026
  • Content License: CC BY 4.0
  • © 2026 Author(s)

Chapter Information

Chapter Title

Whose History We Keep: Benchmarking our Records of the Past’s Protagonists

Authors

Lennart Finke, Sarah Sophie Pohl, Luca Lukačević, Janek Große, Stefan Haas

Language

English

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-1010-2.30

Peer Reviewed

Publication Year

2026

Copyright Information

© 2026 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Bibliographic Information

Book Title

Wikidata e la ricerca. Condividere esperienze / Wikidata and Research. Sharing Experiences

Book Subtitle

Atti del Convegno, Firenze, 5-6 giugno 2025 / Conference proceedings, Florence, 5-6 June 2025

Editors

Elena Marangoni, Camillo Carlo Pellizzari di San Girolamo

Peer Reviewed

Number of Pages

378

Publication Year

2026

Copyright Information

© 2026 Author(s)

Content License

CC BY 4.0

Metadata License

CC0 1.0

Publisher Name

Firenze University Press

DOI

10.36253/979-12-215-1010-2

ISBN Print

979-12-215-1009-6

eISBN (pdf)

979-12-215-1010-2

Series Title

Studi e saggi

Series ISSN

2704-6478

Series E-ISSN

2704-5919

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