Wikipedia fosters “a new form of gatekeeping” and is an “adhocracy”  25.10.10

No surprise here, nevertheless it’s worth reading:

This article introduces criticism elimination, a type of information removal leading to a framing effect that impairs Wikipedia’s delivery of a neutral point of view (NPOV) and ultimately facilitates a new form of gatekeeping with political science and information technology implications. This article demonstrates a systematic use of criticism elimination and categorizes the editors respon- sible into four types. We show that some types use criticism elimination to dominate and manipulate articles to advocate political and ideological agendas.…

The examination of 627 edits spread over 16 Wikipedia articles demonstrates systematic removal of criticism published by reliable sources, despite policy. This leads to framing that runs counter to the NPOV policy…

We have shown that criticism elimination can have a gatekeeping effect that allows parts of Wikipedia to be dominated by those with an agenda. …

For now, criticism elimination means at least some parts of Wikipedia are susceptible to unexpected, systematic framing, and gate- keepers do indeed exist.

Oboler, Andre, Steinberg, Gerald and Stern, Rephael(2010) ‘The Framing of Political NGOs in Wikipedia through Criticism Elimination’, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 7: 4, 284 — 299 (DOI: 10.1080/19331680903577822)

One Comment on “Wikipedia fosters “a new form of gatekeeping” and is an “adhocracy””

  1. 1 Andre Oboler said at 10:40 on October 31st, 2010:

    Hi Andreas,

    Thanks for the review. The main contribution of the paper was actually the evidence of systematic bias and particularly the way information removal is used to facilitate this. I’m hoping others will comment on the types of Wikipedia users we have introduced and suggests focused ways of combating the problems some types of uses intentionally introduce.

    Happy to receive any further thoughts you have over e-mail.

    – Andre