The role of English Wikipedia in mediating East Asian historical disputes: the case of Balhae

ABSTRACT

With the expansion of the Internet in the early twenty-first century, public historical disputes between South Korea and China have become more pronounced. While existing research has focused on domestic Korean or Chinese digital spaces, the convergence or clash of these national narratives on global platforms remains underexplored. Our research bridges this gap by investigating the role of online platforms in shaping public historical debates. We compare the portrayals of Balhae, an ancient kingdom with contested contexts between the two nations. By comparing Chinese, Korean, and English Wikipedia entries on Balhae, we identify differences in narrative construction and framing. Employing Habermas’s typology of human action, we scrutinize related talk pages on English Wikipedia to examine the strategic actions multinational contributors employ to shape historical representation. This exploration reveals the dual role of online platforms in both amplifying and mediating historical disputes. While Wikipedia’s policies promote rational discourse, our findings indicate that contributors often vacillate between strategic and communicative actions. Nonetheless, the resulting article approximates Habermasian ideals of communicative rationality. This interaction accentuates the challenges and potential of fostering rational online discourse, the complexities of digital collaboration, and the quest for neutrality in open, decentralized platforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Wikipedia
• digital nationalism
• neutrality
• communicative action
• strategic action
• Balhae
• Sino-Korean relations

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The name of the kingdom is rendered 渤海 (pinyin: Bóhǎi) in contemporary standard Chinese, 발해 (romanized: Balhae) in Korean, and Бохай (romanized: Bokhay) in Russian; in this study, we have opted to use the name Balhae, following the title employed in the Wikipedia article and to avoid lexical disambiguation.

2 https://xtools.wmcloud.org

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view

4 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/渤海国

5 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/中国历史

6 https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/4/9260981/jimmy-wales-wikipedia-china

7 https://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportPageEditsPerLanguageBreakdown.htm

8 https://baike.baidu.com/item/渤海国/1551268

9 https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/발해

10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balhae

11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Balhae/Archive_1

12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Balhae/Archive_2

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Institute of Information & communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) under the metaverse support program (IITP-2024-RS-2022-00156435) grant funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT); Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (RS-2023-00241749).

Notes on contributors

Jonghyun Jee

Jonghyun Jee is a master student at the Graduate School of Metaverse, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His research interests include digital nationalism and computational social sciences.

Byungjun Kim

Byungjun Kim, Ph.D. (Sungkyunkwan University), is a research assistant professor at the Center for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His research interests include digital humanities, natural language processing, and computational social science.

Bong Gwan Jun

Bong Gwan Jun, Ph.D. (Seoul National University), serves as a professor at the School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). His scholarly endeavors focus on digital humanities, digital storytelling, and Korean literature.