Why put the history of shell companies on Wikipedia?

Within the ERC project Digital Archaeology of Shell Companies, three members of the team — Benoît, Stefanie and Victoria — have begun to transfer part of the knowledge we collect to Wikipedia and Wikidata¹. This is not simply an outreach exercise. For us, Wikipedia is also a research infrastructure, a public-history space and a way of intervening in the uneven geography of online knowledge.

A first, very practical reason: our project studies thousands of actors, institutions, and types of companies, including banks, law firms, fiduciaries, registries, regulators, holding companies, offshore centres and cross-border intermediaries. Stabilising names, dates, institutional histories and relationships is one of the basic conditions for collaborative research. Instead of building a closed internal wiki, we want, whenever possible, to work with open infrastructures. Wikidata is especially useful because it provides structured identifiers that can link people, firms and institutions across languages and datasets.²

This does not replace our own databases, nor does it mean uploading unpublished archival interpretations. Wikipedia’s rules on verifiability, neutrality and “no original research” remain essential constraints³. But they can also be productive: they force us to distinguish clearly between archival hypotheses, published knowledge and stable reference information.

Open Science Beyond the Repository

A second motivation is connected to the open-science logic of ERC-funded research. The ERC requires open access to peer-reviewed publications and encourages good research-data management and sharing where possible.⁴ For historians, however, open science should go beyond depositing articles in repositories. If research is publicly funded, part of its results should become accessible in spaces where a broad audience actually searches for knowledge. Wikipedia is one of those spaces.

Roy Rosenzweig already described it as one of the most important free historical resources on the web and as a major challenge to historians because it combines open access with collaborative production.⁵

Screenshot from Wikipedia

Wikipedia as a Public-History Space

Third, Wikipedia is not only a channel for knowledge dissemination; it is a public-history space. Historical knowledge on Wikipedia is produced through articles, edit histories and talk pages, where users debate, correct and negotiate representations of the past.⁶ This corresponds to a broader understanding of public history as history produced not only for publics, but also with them.⁷ For our project, this matters. Wikipedia contributions can be expanded, corrected or challenged by other editors. This makes the work less controllable than an academic publication, but also more genuinely public.

Visibility and the Geography of Online Knowledge

Finally, our intervention concerns visibility. The infrastructures we study — shell companies, fiduciaries, fund vehicles, banking secrecy, company registries, tax law and offshore regulation — have shaped contemporary capitalism, yet they are often poorly represented in general knowledge spaces. The same applies to several places at the centre of our project. Luxembourg, Panama, the British Virgin Islands and Singapore have been crucial nodes in global financial networks, but their histories are still often narrated from the perspective of larger states. Research on Wikimedia knowledge gaps and geographical bias reminds us that open platforms reproduce inequalities unless people actively work against them.⁸

References

_1. Here the list of the contributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Benelux_Education_Program/University_of_Luxembourg/202

_2. James Baker et Ammandeep K. Mahal, « “I have always found the whole area a minefield”: Wikidata, historical lives, and knowledge infrastructure », International Journal of Digital Humanities, 1 août 2024, vol. 6, n^o 2, p. 217‑236.

_3. Petros Apostolopoulos, Producing and Debating History: Historical Knowledge on Wikipedia, Walter de Gruyter, 2024.

_4. https://erc.europa.eu/manage-your-project/open-science

_5. Roy Rosenzweig, « Can history be open source? Wikipedia and the future of the past », The Journal of American History, 2006, vol. 93, n^o 1, p. 117‑146.

_6. Petros Apostolopoulos, Producing and Debating History, op. cit.

_7. Cauvin T. (dir.), Public History: A Textbook of Practice, 2e éd., New York, Routledge, 2022.

_8. Miriam Redi, Martin Gerlach, Isaac Johnson, Jonathan Morgan, et Leila Zia, « A Taxonomy of Knowledge Gaps for Wikimedia Projects (Second Draft) »2021 arXiv:2008.12314.

More about the research project

• Digital archaeology of shell companies: infrastructures of global connections and local networks (DIGSHELL)