Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-01-31/Recent research
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A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.
A "lack of bureaucratic openness and rules constraining administrator behavior" enabled nationalist takeover of Croatian Wikipedia
- Reviewed by Bri and Tilman Bayer
A paper titled "Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias"[1] (accepted for publication in the CSCW 2024 proceedings) examines the well-known case of the Croatian Wikipedia hijacking by far-right nationalists (from at least 2011 to 2020), and asks why the similarly situated Serbian, Bosnian and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias managed to escape this fate.
As summarized in a post by the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public (an interdisciplinary center involving UW's Information School, School of Law, and Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering), on the Croatian Wikipedia
[A] cabal [of nationalist editors] seized complete control of the governance of the encyclopedia, banned and blocked those who disagreed with them, and operated a network of fake accounts to give the appearance of grassroots support for their policies...
— CIP summary
This has already been documented in detail in a report commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation (see e.g. prior Signpost coverage: "Croatian Wikipedia: capture and release", Disinformation report, 2021-06-27 and "Wikimedia Foundation builds 'Knowledge Integrity Risk Observatory' to enable communities to monitor at-risk Wikipedias", Recent research, 2022-11-28).
However, the present paper's findings go beyond that, focusing on the capture of governance on Croatian Wikipedia as distinguished from other language-group wikis where it did not happen, particularly the Serbian Wikipedia. The findings point at weak policies and norms that allowed capture to happen, especially the lack of policies around blocking, and the importance of integrity amongst the community's bureaucrats, who can grant and remove admin permissions.
The researchers used a grounded theory approach, specifically a "qualitative analysis of interview data with a range of participants in Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia and in the broader Wikipedia community" (15 interviews in total). Based on this,
... we arrived at three propositions that, together, help explain why Croatian Wikipedia succumbed to capture while Serbian Wikipedia did not:
1. Perceived Value as a Target. Is the project worth expending the effort to capture?
2. Bureaucratic Openness. How easy is it for contributors outside the core founding team to ascend to local governance positions?
3. Institutional Formalization. To what degree does the project prefer personalistic, informal forms of organization over formal ones?
We found that both Croatian Wikipedia and Serbian Wikipedia were attractive targets for far-right nationalist capture due to their sizable readership and resonance with a national identity. However, we also found that the two projects diverged early on in their trajectories in terms of how open they remained to new contributors ascending to local governance positions and the degree to which they privileged informal relationships over formal rules and processes as organizing principles of the project. Ultimately, Croatian’s relative lack of bureaucratic openness and rules constraining administrator behavior created a window of opportunity for a motivated contingent of editors to seize control of the governance mechanisms of the project.
The authors state in the paper that it is the first academic work they know of "that has considered how distributed influence operations target, become deeply engaged with, and are facilitated by institutional and organizational arrangements within peer production communities like Wikipedia".
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- See the page of the monthly Wikimedia Research Showcase for videos and slides of past presentations.
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Other recent publications
Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.
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References
- ^ Kharazian, Zarine; Starbird, Kate; Hill, Benjamin Mako (2023-11-06), Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias, arXiv. Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2024)
- Supplementary references and notes:
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Discuss this story
While we don't have and explicit anti-regionalism policy we do have MOS:COMMONALITY which encourages use of English that will be understood across the English speaking world. This might be called an anti-insularity 'policy'. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 20:13, 31 January 2024 (UTC).[reply]