Wikimedia Research/Showcase/Archive/2021/02

February 2021

Theme

Censorship

February 17, 2021 Video: YouTube

Shocking the Crowd - The Effect of Censorship Shocks on Chinese Wikipedia

By Daniel Romero (University of Michigan)

Collaborative crowdsourcing has become a popular approach to organizing work across the globe. Being global also means being vulnerable to shocks – unforeseen events that disrupt crowds – that originate from any country. In this study, we examine changes in collaborative behavior of editors of Chinese Wikipedia that arise due to the 2005 government censorship in mainland China. Using the exogenous variation in the fraction of editors blocked across different articles due to the censorship, we examine the impact of reduction in group size, which we denote as the shock level, on three collaborative behavior measures: volume of activity, centralization, and conflict. We find that activity and conflict drop on articles that face a shock, whereas centralization increases. The impact of a shock on activity increases with shock level, whereas the impact on centralization and conflict is higher for moderate shock levels than for very small or very high shock levels. These findings provide support for threat rigidity theory – originally introduced in the organizational theory literature – in the context of large-scale collaborative crowds.

* paper published at ICWSM 2017

* slides on figshare

Censorship's Effect on Incidental Exposure to Information - Evidence from Wikipedia

By Margaret Roberts (University of California San Diego)

The fast-growing body of research on internet censorship has examined the effects of censoring selective pieces of political information and the unintended consequences of censorship of entertainment. However, we know very little about the broader consequences of coarse censorship or censorship that affects a large array of information such as an entire website or search engine. In this study, we use China’s complete block of Chinese language Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) on May 19, 2015, to disaggregate the effects of coarse censorship on proactive consumption of information—information users seek out—and on incidental consumption of information—information users are not actively seeking but consume when they happen to come across it. We quantify the effects of censorship of Wikipedia not only on proactive information consumption but also on opportunities for exploration and incidental consumption of information. We find that users from mainland China were much more likely to consume information on Wikipedia about politics and history incidentally rather than proactively, suggesting that the effects of censorship on incidental information access may be politically significant.