The feminist critique

mapping controversy in Wikipedia

Morgan Currie

pp. 224-248

in: David M. Berry (ed), Understanding digital humanities, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

Research on Wikipedia often compares its articles to print references such as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a resource historically associated with depoliticised content, neutrality, and the desire to catalogue the external world objectively.Yet Wikipedia, the free-content, openly editable, online encyclopedia, evolves out of a process whereby multiple perspectives, motives, compromises, and protocols determine the present version of an article. Using controversy as an epistemological device, can we explore Wikipedia to map editors' concerns around an issue? Can we observe how the mechanics of controversy regulation affect the quality of an article?