ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a necessarily limited sketch of crusading ‘WikiKnowledge’ and is concerned with mapping two topographies: the epistemological dimensions of Wikipedia’s ‘Crusades’ article and ‘Talk’ pages and the ethnographic geography of the community engaged in their creation. Crusading on Wikipedia consists of an overview article on the historical crusades as well as articles covering subtopics in detail. The crusades, the article begins, were ‘a series of religious wars sanctioned by the Latin Church in the medieval period’. The chapter focuses on the ‘Crusades’ article as it is the ‘landing page’ for anyone searching for the crusades in general, and describes the most direct engagement of editors with crusading and the crusades. The uneven handling of sources is illustrated by the repetition of a phrase from Norman Davies’ Europe three times in which he argued that the crusades ‘strengthened the nexus between Western Christendom, feudalism, and militarism’.
