Wikipedia in the anti-SOPA protests as a case study of direct,deliberative democracy in cyberspace

This paper contributes to the discussion on deliberative, direct democracy and volunteer mobilization in the Internet era by analyzing the vote participation levels of Wikipedia volunteer editors (Wikipedians). On 18th January 2012 in the ‘first Internet strike’ against the American ‘Stop Online Piracy Act' legislation, over two thousand Wikipedians took part in the vote concerning whether their site should undertake a protest action, with vast majority expressing support for this action. However, the vote participants formed only a tiny fraction of the total number of Wikipedians who number in millions. Although Wikipedia can be seen as an open, democratic forum practicing deliberative, direct democracy, the process of voting on Wikipedia is significantly influenced by participation inequality, with a majority of the vote participation coming from a small group of most active contributors – an effective oligarchy. This paper discusses the intricate dynamics between Wikipedia egalitarian ethos and the creed to discuss project matters deliberately on one hand and the conspicuous lack of promotion and advertisement stemming from a rule against ‘canvassing’ and an overall skepticism regarding the status of majority votes. While voters' passivity and lack of interest play a major role, as expected, another factor emerges as a significant factor responsible for the low levels of participation: an inefficient information distribution system, as the vast majority of Wikipedians were not aware of the ongoing discussions and the vote itself until after their conclusion.     

Wiki-worthy: collective judgment of candidate notability

The use of socio-technical data to predict elections is a growing research area. We argue that election prediction research suffers from under-specified theoretical models that do not properly distinguish between ‘poll-like’ and ‘prediction market-like’ mechanisms understand findings. More specifically, we argue that, in systems with strong norms and reputational feedback mechanisms, individuals have market-like incentives to bias content creation toward candidates they expect will win. We provide evidence for the merits of this approach using the creation of Wikipedia pages for candidates in the 2010 US and UK national legislative elections. We find that Wikipedia editors are more likely to create Wikipedia pages for challengers who have a better chance of defeating their incumbent opponent and that the timing of these page creations coincides with periods when collective expectations for the candidate's success are relatively high.     

The influence of network structures of Wikipedia discussion pages on the efficiency of WikiProjects

As a platform for discussion and communication, talk pages play an essential role in Wikipedia to facilitate coordination, sharing of information and knowledge resources among Wikipedians. In this work we explore the influence of network structures of these pages on the efficiency of WikiProjects. Project efficiency is measured as the amount of work done by project members in a quarter. The study uses the comments on WikiProject talk pages to construct communication networks. The structural properties of these networks are studied using ideas from social network theory. We develop three hypotheses about how network structures influence project effectiveness and examine the hypotheses using a longitudinal dataset of 362 WikiProjects. The evaluation suggests that an intermediate level of cohesion with a core of influential users dominating network flow improves effectiveness for a WikiProject, and that greater average membership tenure relates to project efficiency in a positive way. We discuss the implications of this analysis for the future management of WikiProjects.     

Governance, Organization, and Democracy on the Internet: The Iron Law and the Evolution of Wikipedia

This study examines whether the Iron Law of Oligarchy exists in Wikipedia by analyzing how a key policy of the website regarding verifiability evolved into its current form. The study describes the decision-making processes of Wikipedia and shows that there are many factors preventing or slowing the development of oligarchy on Wikipedia. The study provides data advancing theoretical concepts related to the Iron Law of Oligarchy and the evolution of virtual communities and organizations; results and knowledge gained can also improve Wikipedia policies related to verifiability. Michels wrote: "who says organization, says oligarchy." I argue that we should follow this with a caveat: "who says wiki-organization, says no to oligarchy."     

Conflict dynamics in collaborative knowledge production. A study of network gatekeeping on Wikipedia

Digitalization has fundamentally changed gatekeeping by allowing users to participate in processes of information control. We study gatekeeping on Wikipedia by analyzing networks of deletions among editors. Factors considered to explain the emergence of these networks are editors’ information production capability, their range of activity, their communicative ties, their geographical location, and their past interactions. Relying on relational event models, we find that the observed gatekeeping processes are not only shaped by the factors related to an editor’s standing in the community, but also to a certain extent by their attribution to content-related groups and some forms of past interactions.     

No praise without effort: experimental evidence on how rewards affect Wikipedia's contributor community

The successful provision of public goods through mass volunteering over the Internet poses a puzzle to classic social science theories of human cooperation. A solution suggested by recent studies proposes that informal rewards (e.g. a thumbs-up, a badge, an editing award, etc.) can motivate participants by raising their status in the community, which acts as a select incentive to continue contributing. Indeed, a recent study of Wikipedia found that receiving a reward had a large positive effect on the subsequent contribution levels of highly-active contributors. While these findings are suggestive, they only pertained to already highly-active contributors. Can informal rewards also serve as a mechanism to increase participation among less-active contributors by initiating a virtuous cycle of work and reward? We conduct a field experiment on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia in which we bestowed rewards to randomly selected editors of varying productivity levels. Analysis of post-treatment activity shows that despite greater room for less-active contributors to increase their productive efforts, rewards yielded increases in work only among already highly-productive editors. On the other hand, rewards were associated with lower retention of less-active contributors. These findings suggest that the incentive structure in peer production is broadly meritocratic, as highly-active contributors accumulate the most rewards. However, this may also contribute to the divide between the stable core of highly-prodigious producers and a peripheral population of less-active contributors with shorter volunteer tenures.     

WIKIPEDIA

The decentralized participatory architecture of the Internet challenges traditional knowledge authorities and hierarchies. Questions arise about whether lay inclusion helps to ‘democratize’ knowledge formation or if existing hierarchies are re-enacted online. This article focuses on Wikipedia, a much-celebrated example which gives an in-depth picture of the process of knowledge production in an open environment. Drawing on insights from the sociology of knowledge, Wikipedia's talk pages are conceptualized as an arena where reality is socially constructed. Using grounded theory, this article examines the entry for the September 11 attacks and its related talk pages in the German Wikipedia. Numerous alternative interpretations (labeled as ‘conspiracy theories’) that fundamentally contradict the account of established knowledge authorities regarding this event have emerged. On the talk pages, these views collide, thereby serving as a useful case study to examine the role of experts and lay participants in the process of knowledge construction on Wikipedia. The study asks how the parties negotiate ‘what actually happened’ and which knowledges should be represented in the Wikipedia entry. The conflicting points of view overload the discursive capacity of the contributors. The community reacts by marginalizing opposing knowledge and protecting or immunizing the article against these disparate views. This is achieved by rigorously excluding knowledge which is not verified by external expert authorities. Therefore, in this case, lay participation did not lead to a ‘democratization’ of knowledge production, but rather re-enacted established hierarchies.     

The free encyclopedia that anyone can dispute: An analysis of the micro-structural dynamics of positive and negative relations in the production of contentious Wikipedia articles

We consider two rival hypotheses on the emergence of organization in open production communities. According to the first (“reputation hypothesis”), patterns of agreement and disagreement among participants in open production communities are explained by differences in individual reputation for quality of contribution. The reputation hypothesis predicts that participants will tend to agree with more reputable others and disagree with less reputable others thus contributing to establish a stable open production community. According to the second hypothesis (“balance hypothesis”), patterns of agreement and disagreement are explained by membership in sub-communities of “friends” and “enemies.” The balance hypothesis predicts that participants in open production communities will agree mainly with friends and disagree mainly with enemies, regardless of considerations about reputation for the quality of their contributions. In this paper, we examine which one of these hypotheses is more consistent with patterns of positive and negative interaction events observed during the production of the complete set of 1,206 English-language Wikipedia articles officially considered controversial. We specify and estimate new models for signed and weighted relational event networks predicting the probability that a user deletes the contributions of another user – thus expressing personal disagreement – and/or protects the contributions of another user against deletion from third parties – thus expressing personal agreement. In an analysis of positive and negative interaction among Wikipedia contributors consisting of more than 60 million observations, we find strong support for the balance hypothesis and for the predictions of the reputation hypothesis that are more consistent with alter-centric interpretations of social status as conferred by alters through observable acts of deference.