where I'm cited on Wikipedia

Last week, I read a post from Andrew Heiss on Bluesky that inspired me to take a look at whether/where I was cited on any Wikipedia articles. I knew my research had been referenced on one particular page, but I’d never done a thorough search for this and decided to give it a whirl.

While I can’t claim anything as cool as the page on Hosni Mubarak (where Andrew’s research is cited), my research is referenced on three different Wikipedia articles, which feels pretty cool, actually. It seems like my newer Mormon Studies work is what is getting traction on Wikipedia, as opposed to my historical (and continuing) focus on educational technology research. This doesn’t totally surprise me; I’ve observed for a couple of years (or longer) that while my edtech research gets a whole lot more scholarly attention, my Mormon Studies work tends to get more media and popular interest. I attribute this to doing niche work on subjects where a smaller number of people show a greater amount of interest in what I’m studying.

Anyway, here are the three articles on Wikipedia where my work gets cited in some way:

DezNat

This article on the online “DezNat” movement cites the article I published with Amy Chapman on the movement (to my knowledge, the most extensive scholarly treatment on DezNat) as well as a blog post I wrote where I reproduced a passage of a Salt Lake Tribune article I’d been quoted in. I have some quibbles with how my work is cited here: First, the article is cited in two different ways, not counting a citation of a Times & Season blog post that reproduces the article’s abstract. Second, it uses our research as support for describing DezNat as a “far-right” movement even though we emphasize the (intentional) ambiguity of that status. Note that this isn’t a defense of DezNat (either in the article or in this post), just an acknowledgment that at least from the theoretical perspective we used, it’s the ambiguity of the movement’s far-right status that is the most interesting. For all those quibbles, though, I’m genuinely flattered to be referenced in this article.

Mormonism and violence

I basically only appear in this article because it also references DezNat, so not much more to add here.

Church of Jesus Christ in Zion

This article on an obscure Latter Day Saint denomination/group was the one that really surprised me. Not too much, I guess: The denomination gets referenced in the article in Dialogue where I identify it as the previous owner of the LDS Church’s current domain name. That article gets cited, as does an article in the Salt Lake Tribune about my research. That said, all I know about this denomination I got from other sources, so I think that Steve Shields really ought to get the credit here.

• Andrew Heiss
• Bluesky
• research
• Wikipedia
• online Mormonism
• Mormon Studies
• edtech
• DezNat