(Don't) Mention the War: A Comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica Articles on National Histories

In this paper we present a large-scale quantitative comparison between expert- and crowdsourced writing of history by analysing articles from the English Wikipedia and Britannica. In order to quantify attention to particular periods, we extract mentioned year numbers and utilise them to study historical timelines of nations stretched over the last thousand years. By combining this temporal analysis with lexical analysis of both encyclopedic corpora we can identify distinctive historiographic points of view in each encyclopedia. We find that Britannica focuses on social and cultural phenomena, e.g. religion, as well as the geographical characteristics of states, while Wikipedia puts emphasis on political aspects, concentrating on wars and violent conflicts, and events of high popularity. Finally, both encyclopedias exhibit characteristics of English Academic prose, with Britannica being slightly less readable compared to Wikipedia, according to several readability scores.