The colonization of Wikipedia: evidence from characteristic editing behaviors of warring camps
| Date | 24 October 2022 |
| Pages | 784-810 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-04-2022-0090 |
| Published date | 24 October 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Danielle A. Morris-O'Connor,Andreas Strotmann,Dangzhi Zhao |
The colonization of Wikipedia:
evidence from characteristic
editing behaviors of warring camps
Danielle A. Morris-O’Connor
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Andreas Strotmann
ScienceXplore, Bad Schandau, Germany, and
Dangzhi Zhao
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
Abstract
Purpose –To add new empirical knowledge to debates about social practices of peer production communities,
and to conversations about bias and its implications for democracy. To help identify Wikipedia (WP) articles
that are affected by systematic bias and hopefully help alleviate the impact of such bias on the general public,
thus helping enhance both traditional (e.g. libraries) and online information services (e.g. Google) in ways that
contribute to democracy. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives.
Design/methodology/approach –Quantitatively, the authors identify edit-warring camps across many
conflict zones of the English language WP, and profile and compare success rates and typologies of camp edits
in the corresponding topic areas. Qualitatively,the authors analyze the edit war between two senior WP editors
that resulted in imbalanced and biased articles throughout a topic area for such editorial characteristics
through a close critical reading.
Findings –Through a large-scale quantitative study, the authors find that winner-take-all camps exhibit
biasing editing behaviors to a much larger extent than the camps they successfully edit-war against,
confirming findings of prior small-scale qualitative studies. The authors also confirm the employment of these
behaviors and identify other behaviors in the successful silencing of traditional medicinal knowledge on WP by
a scientism-biased senior WP editor through close reading.
Social implications –WP sadly does, as previously claimed, appear to be a platform that represents the
biased viewpoints of its most stridently opinionated Western white male editors, and routinely misrepresents
scholarly work and scientific consensus, the authors find. WP is therefore in dire need of scholarly oversight
and decolonization.
Originality/value–The authors independently verify findings from prior personal accounts of highly power-
imbalanced fights of scholars against senior editors on WP through a third-partyclose reading of a much more
power balanced edit war between senior WP editors. The authors confirm that these findings generalize well to
edit wars across WP, through a large scale quantitative analysis of unbalanced edit wars across a wide range of
zones of contention on WP.
Keywords Wikipedia, Bias, Editing behaviours, Big data, Close reading, Decolonization, Scientism,
Silenced voices
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Wikipedia (WP) has long become a vital source of information on the Web and has become
integral to popular and powerful platforms such as Facebook and Google. Information has a
clear effect on the choices people make and any critical inaccuracy or bias on WP may have
major negative impact on, and potentially be detrimental to, society. Although biased
JD
79,3
784
This work was funded through an Insight Development Grant of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The authors gratefully acknowledge Xinrui Zhang’s great
software development skills that helped make this project a success. The authors also wish to thank our
two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful and thoughtful feedback.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 25 April 2022
Revised 30 September 2022
Accepted 5 October 2022
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 79 No. 3, 2023
pp. 784-810
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-04-2022-0090
information can be included accidentally, the impact is furthered in the form of systematic
bias added through organized manipulation (Dori-Hacohen, 2017;Entman, 2007). It is critical
to scientifically investigate systematic bias on WP to see what kinds of editorial practices
contribute to such bias, and if such bias and its “priming effects on audiences”fall into
persistent patterns relevant to political or other agendas.
Such research can help to fill a substantial gap in studies on WP. It can add new empirical
knowledge to debates about social practices of peer production communities, and to
conversations about bias and its implications for democracy, particularly in the current
context of political manipulation of public opinions on social media and “echo chamber”(or
“filter bubble”) effects from the personalization of online services such as Google and
Facebook (Introna and Nissenbaum, 2000;Dori-Hacohen, 2017). It can help identify WP
articles that are affected by systematic bias and hopefully help alleviate the impact of such
bias on the general public, thus helping enhance both traditional (e.g. libraries) and online
information services (e.g. Google) in ways that contribute to democracy. After all, exposure to
diverse opinions can improve civic discourse and is “one of deliberative democracy’s basic
tenets”(Dori-Hacohen, 2017;Sunstein, 2009;Yom-Tov and Boyd, 2014).
As a first step of this research program, the present study aims to, (1) identify editorial
behaviors typically utilized for dominating controversial articles through a big-data
approach, and (2) through a close reading, explore how these and other exhibited behaviors
played out on one WP article between two particular editors, and how these behaviors extend
into a wider topic area to succeed in biasing articles with a strong colonial bent. This study
can serve as a more objective cross-check for previously reported tactics for introducing and
maintaining bias observed from personal experiences of disputes on WP, and could provide
evidence to generate empirically grounded hypotheses concerning editorial practices
indicative of systematic bias.
2. Theoretical framework
In their work on the possibility of rational discourse on WP, Hansen et al. (2009) outline
Habermas’three forms of social action: instr umental, strategic and communicative.
Instrumental and strategic actions are goal-directed or success-oriented. Communicative
action, on the other hand, is oriented toward achieving mutual understanding, and when such
mutual understanding is not readily accomplished, it must be negotiated by the parties
through civilized argumentation, or “rational discourse”(Hansen et al., 2009).
Our quantitative research began from Hansen et al. (2009)’s claim that WP’s policies and
guidelines for contributing and for resolving conflicts appear closely modeled on the
Habermasian ideal of communicative action and rational discourse. These policies have a
focus on mutual understanding and consensus building, where everyone can make any kind
of contribution, free of force, and where good faith is assumed (Hansen et al., 2009). Thus, we
can assume that if these policies are systematically followed, all content on WP would
necessarily conform to the WP Neutral Point of View (WP:NPOV) spirit, or more precisely, a
spirit of a balance of diversity-of-views, and one-sided articles where one camp “hogs”
contributions with long-term survival characteristics should be impossible.
If, however, one-sided articles in this sense do exist (as has been reported in the literature),
we can conclude that instrumental or strategic actions are involved, i.e. editing behaviors that
aim to win the argument rather than to achieve mutual understanding. When we therefore
pinpoint particular instances of grossly imbalanced WP articles and find that they appear
systematically across entire topic areas with the same groups of editors, Habermas’forms of
social action essentially tell us that we can then investigate the winning camps’editing
behaviors for communication strategies that help them circumvent the official WP spirit of
collaboration via rational discourse to introduce and maintain systematic bias.
The
colonization of
Wikipedia
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