Prevalent Community Values on Wikipedia

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Jonathan Morgan, who shifts our focus to Wikipedia. His interest is in how communal values are expressed by participants on the site – for example around specific controversies on the site. His project examined the debates around the Jyllands Posten / Muhammad cartoons controversy; here, the editors who created the Wikipedia entry covering this issue decided to include the offending cartoon in the entry at first, which generated substantial debate.

The site’s professed aim is to empower and engage people around the world, and founder Jimmy Wales has echoed these sentiments in his own statements. Surveys of Wikipedians in the English-language Wikipedia also refer to altruism, reciprocity, sense of community, as well as fun and a sense of mission.

On Wikipedia talk pages, a smaller subset of the community engage, and specific issues are negotiated; discourse often focusses on particular problems, and is often discussed in very consensus-oriented fashion. However, where issues become more polarised, the discourse becomes more of an argument aimed to influence the largest number of participants – it becomes a tyranny of the majority, Jonathan says. People ‘camp out’ on these pages in order to quickly undo any changes which they don’t agree with, too.

On such controversial pages, there are high stakes and high levels of participation; the Muhammad cartoon controversy is one such example. This research project coded contributions to the debate – 55% were for a retention of the cartoons, 24% advocated a compromise solution, and 13% argued against. Many contributions also discussed the potential impact of retaining the cartoons (for the entry, or for Wikipedia as a whole), or the relevance of the cartoon to the overall article.

It is also useful to examine the attempts at persuading the wider community here – such attempts frequently appeal to perceived shared values, and therefore reveal what the overall values of the Wikipedia community appear to be. People on different sides of the debate used different appeals, indicating some disagreement over Wikipedia values: in order to importance, pro-retention arguments highlighted relevance, precedent, Wikipedia’s mission, impact, and consensus, while anti-retention contributors highlighted impact, values, precedent, relevance, and mission; those arguing for compromise solutions highlighted impact, precedent, relevance, mission, and consensus.

Given their success, the editors arguing for retention were so successful would appear to best reflect the overall values of Wikipedia, then – perhaps Wikipedia values freedom from censorship more than equality of access, despite the overall rhetoric of empowerment. This may reflect the production vs. consumption imbalance in Wikipedia (everyone can edit, but not everyone does), where equality of access does not result in equal opportunity to participate; displaying the ‘right’ values affects users’ ability to have their edits accepted.

Does Wikipedia need greater mechanisms to facilitate contributions from minority participants, then? Right now, is there a decreased ability for the site to retain editors from diverse backgrounds, for example, and does this undermine the site’s mission?