Hi all,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, February 17,
at 9:00 AM PST/17:00 UTC (Note that this is 30 minutes earlier than the
usual time). This month’s showcase will be around the topic of censorship
(of Wikipedia). In the first talk, Daniel Romero presents a study examining
the effect of censorship on the collaborative behavior of editors. In the
second talk, Margaret Roberts presents work on disaggregating the effects
of censorship on proactive vs incidental consumption of information.
Youtube stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z52wPt34rJc
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You
can also watch our past research showcases here:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase
Talk 1:
Speaker: Daniel Romero (University of Michigan)
Title: Shocking the Crowd: The Effect of Censorship Shocks on Chinese
Wikipedia
Abstract: 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.
Talk 2
Speaker: Margaret Roberts (University of California San Diego)
Title: Censorship's Effect on Incidental Exposure to Information: Evidence
from Wikipedia
Abstract: 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.
--
Martin Gerlach
Research Scientist
Wikimedia Foundation