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Without (Ancient) History: Smell and Senses in Wikipedia

Wikipedia.org is the 5th most clicked on website in a global ranking, at least following the Alexa rank of January 2018, a data service offered by the American company Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon.com. Wikipedia is not just one web-based encyclopaedia, but many as it is currently available in almost 300 different languages (April 2018). Launched in January 2001 and having its seeds in the US created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, the English Wikipedia still is the flagship of the online encyclopaedia hosting over 5,600,000 articles and gaining over 250,000,000 site views per day on average (March 2018). The German Wikipedia is second rank with almost 2,200,000 articles, the French third with almost 2,000,000 articles (April 2018). However, the Spanish Wikipedia usually gains more attention than the German and French version with app. 36,000,000 site views per day in 2017, followed by the German Wikipedia with app. 32,000,000 and the French with 22,600,000 site views per day.

If we consider articles on smell and the senses in the three largest Wikipedias, a striking issue is the lack of information on a history of this sense but also in articles on perception in general. In the German Wikipedia, one explanation of this phenomenon could be the organisation of knowledge through separate editorial boards such as Antiquity or Sciences that are not cooperating. Articles of smell and olfaction seem to have been under review mostly by people interested and/or engaged in sciences but not by those in humanities. This contribution will present the results of an experiment: In the following months the German Wikipedia community should be confronted with the fragrant and the foul in Ancient History and history and other cultures in general (e.g. Sensory Studies and especially Sensory History) in articles on smell and senses.