Managing conflicts between users in Wikipedia

TL;DR

This paper investigates how Wikipedia users resolve conflicts, analyzing user roles and behaviors in dispute discussions and arbitration, to understand conflict management in collaborative online environments.

Contribution

It introduces a user typology based on conflict involvement and analyzes behavior patterns in conflict and well-featured articles.

Findings

User roles influence conflict resolution strategies

Behavior varies between conflict and non-conflict articles

Typology helps predict user participation in disputes

Abstract

Wikipedia is nowadays a widely used encyclopedia, and one of the most visible sites on the Internet. Its strong principle of collaborative work and free editing sometimes generates disputes due to disagreements between users. In this article we study how the wikipedian community resolves the conflicts and which roles do wikipedian choose in this process. We observed the users behavior both in the article talk pages, and in the Arbitration Committee pages specifically dedicated to serious disputes. We first set up a users typology according to their involvement in conflicts and their publishing and management activity in the encyclopedia. We then used those user types to describe users behavior in contributing to articles that are tagged by the wikipedian community as being in conflict with the official guidelines of Wikipedia, or conversely as being well featured.