Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias

TL;DR

This study compares Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia communities to understand how governance structures influence vulnerability to disinformation, revealing that certain organizational features can enable governance capture and bias introduction.

Contribution

It identifies specific governance features that increase susceptibility to disinformation campaigns in self-governing online communities, based on a qualitative comparative analysis.

Findings

Croatian Wikipedia was taken over by a small group promoting far-right bias.

Serbian Wikipedia largely avoided governance capture despite similar threats.

Three governance features—perceived value, bureaucratic openness, informal organization—contributed to Croatian Wikipedia's vulnerability.

Abstract

What types of governance arrangements makes some self-governed online groups more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns? To answer this question, we present a qualitative comparative analysis of the Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia editions. We do so because between at least 2011 and 2020, the Croatian language version of Wikipedia was taken over by a small group of administrators who introduced far-right bias and outright disinformation; dissenting editorial voices were reverted, banned, and blocked. Although Serbian Wikipedia is roughly similar in size and age, shares many linguistic and cultural features, and faced similar threats, it seems to have largely avoided this fate. Based on a grounded theory analysis of interviews with members of both communities and others in cross-functional platform-level roles, we propose that the convergence of three features -- high perceived value as a target, limited early bureaucratic openness, and a preference for personalistic, informal forms of organization over formal ones -- produced a window of opportunity for governance capture on Croatian Wikipedia. Our findings illustrate that online community governing infrastructures can play a crucial role in systematic disinformation campaigns and other influence operations.