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.


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Martin Gerlach

Research Scientist

Wikimedia Foundation