Somewhat interesting new journal article: * http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0060584
The researchers found that political discussions among openly Wikipedians who declare a U.S. party affinity on their user pages don't follow some of the common patterns observed in other online communities. For example, researchers have documented that among bloggers, those affiliated with the same party tend to discuss amongst each other much more commonly (what they gloss as " cyberbalkanization"); and they also reference the "other side's" in a way that's much more likely to be argumentative, dismissive, and/or negative. But on Wikipedia neither appears to be true: those who declare a U.S. party affiliation don't seem to either segregate into more discussion with others on "their side", or to have a clear pattern of more acrimonious interactions with the "other" side than with "theirs".
Taken for whatever it's worth, of course. One hypothesis is the one the paper offers, that our Wikipedian community identity trumps partisan affiliation when it comes to guiding on-wiki interaction patterns. A more skeptical hypothesis could be that the D/R split is actually, unlike in the U.S. political blogosphere, not one of the more vicious ones among Wikipedians to begin with, so is in a way an easier case. A guess: a different fault line, like Israel/Palestine, might turn up less positive results.
But in any case, it's an interesting read. -Mark _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
