'Is' to 'Was'

Abstract

Following the deaths of notable people, Wikipedians incorporate this new knowledge by updating or creating biographical articles. Drawing on literature from death studies and peer production, we demonstrate how the creation of these "wikibituaries" requires complex coordination work and highlight processes of commemoration and memorialization within socio-technical systems. Using the corpus of 6,132 articles about people who died in 2012, we examine the network relationships and contribution dynamics of users who perform this work and identify behavioral and content dynamics on the biographical articles about the deceased. The collaborations that emerge from posthumous editing of these biographies are sites of significant activity that coalesce into complex but temporary collaborations. Based on these findings, we argue that Wikipedia has re-imagined the obituary into a genre for creating memory spaces in which the death of a subject prompts a form of "death work" involving the collective re-evaluation of article content and a transition into a new mode of data stewardship.

Representing COVID-19 information in collaborative knowledge graphs: The case of Wikidata

“…the representation of COVID-19 information at the scale of individual cases, days and incidents) and collaborative editing have also made it highly up to date on queries such as the most recent death of notable persons due to COVID-19. This result is difficult to achieve with other datasets (Supplementary Figure S3), and mirrors Wikipedia's well-known rapid response to updating information on deaths [42,89].…”

Information science and the inevitable: A literature review at the intersection of death and information management: An Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) paper

“…Particularly, information sharing in such studies reflects its role in both communication (Baker, 2004;Case, 2008;Fourie, 2012Fourie, , 2020Pausch & Zaslow, 2008;Zimmerman, 2023) and presentation, for example sharing on social media (Fourie, 2020;Ochôa & Pinto, 2019;Schoenebeck & Conway, 2020;Sofka, 2020). Further, sharing can be a part of death work, for example when the death of a notable person prompts rapid collaboration to memorialize them on their Wikipedia page (Keegan & Brubaker, 2015).…”

Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia

“…Subsequent research followed this perspective with a number of case studies. Memory-building processes for the Egyptian revolution across languages [7], the deaths of notable people [24], and the Vietnam War [33] have all extended the understanding of how editors collaborate, manage conflicts, and produce knowledge in a commemorative mode. The current study extends the application of collective memory to events and memories encoded into individual articles that in turn compose a larger network documenting evidence relevant to a social movement.…”

“…The time between an event and the creation of its Wikipedia article event can signal its significance [27]. Unlike the "wiki-bituary" activity following the deaths of people who already had Wikipedia articles [24], the deceased subjects in our sample did not have articles until after their deaths generated media attention. Figure 3 plots the 37 events and the time elapsed between the event and article creation.…”