Jointly They Edit: Examining the Impact of Community Identification on Political Interaction in Wikipedia

Abstract

BackgroundIn their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase ‘divided they blog’, referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs with a similar political slant, and not to one another. As political discussion and activity increasingly moves online, the power of framing political discourses is shifting from mass media to social media.Methodology/Principal FindingsContinued examination of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display their political affiliation. Next, we analyzed the patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia community.Conclusions/SignificanceOur results indicate that users who proclaim their political affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a ‘Wikipedian’ even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of ‘being Wikipedian’ may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation.

Online network organization of Barcelona en Comú, an emergent movement-party

“…The results have also showed a non-partisan cluster with users associated with the Catalan independence movement. This is consistent with previous research that already indicated that online users do not have a strong preference to discuss with members of the same political party but to discuss around specific topics [ 23 , 48 ]. In contrast, we have seen that the Spanish parties PP, PSC, and CS have a lower predisposition to dialogue with other parties.…”

“…In the case of the American political blogosphere, a seminal work by Adamic et al [ 1 ] showed that few links connected liberal and conservative blogs, as bloggers mostly refer to ideologically related others. On the contrary in Wikipedia, a platform where users editing the same articles are brought to discuss and pursue consensus, partisan users were observed to be equally likely to interact with others supporting the same or the opposite party [ 48 ]. Likewise, in the case of Twitter different results have been observed for retweets and reply networks.…”

Generative models of online discussion threads: state of the art and research challenges

“…Beyond Twitter, recent work on online political networks [37] show that network layers with positive connotation (supports and likes) display stronger patterns of homophily with respect to party alignment than the layer of comments, where no homophily is present. This finding is consistent with studies on Wikipedia [38] in which editors who display their party alignment on their profile show homophily with respect to this alignment when interacting through their user walls, but not through common discussions in talk pages (see Fig. 2).…”

“…2 The reply network in Wikipedia talk pages between Democrats (blue nodes) and Republicans (red nodes) shows no homophily with respect to party alignment. Data from [38] …”

A Framework for the Calibration of Social Simulation Models

“…As a result, a strong, shared identity may develop, even despite the fact that interactions on the Web are often asynchronous and anonymous. For example, recent work by Neff et al analyzed the discourse of editors from the English Wikipedia and discovered that the 'Wikipedian' identity can be stronger than affiliation to the two major parties of the US political system [53].…”