Jointly they edit: examining the impact of community identification on political interaction in Wikipedia

TL;DR

This study investigates how political users in Wikipedia display their political affiliations and interact across party lines, revealing that shared community identity often outweighs political divisions in online interactions.

Contribution

It provides new insights into political identity expression and cross-party interactions within Wikipedia, contrasting with findings from other social media platforms.

Findings

Users tend to emphasize their Wikipedian identity over political affiliation.

No strong preference for same-party interactions was observed.

Shared community identity may reduce political polarization online.

Abstract

In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase "divided they blog", referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs with a similar political slant, and not to one another. As political discussion and activity increasingly moves online, the power of framing political discourses is shifting from mass media to social media. Continued examination of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display (or not to display) their political affiliation. Next, we more closely examined the patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia community. Our results indicate that users who proclaim their political affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a "Wikipedian" even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of "being Wikipedian" may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation.