A Quantitative Portrait of Wikipedia's High-Tempo Collaborations during the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic
It provides insights for improving the resilience of socio-technical systems during crises, addressing concerns about online platform governance, but is incremental in applying existing methods to new data.
This study analyzed Wikipedia's collaborative editing during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, using 973,940 revisions to 4,238 articles, and identified four consistent themes characterizing its large-scale, high-tempo collaborations, such as external events driving activity and complex editor engagement patterns.
The 2020 coronavirus pandemic was a historic social disruption with significant consequences felt around the globe. Wikipedia is a freely-available, peer-produced encyclopedia with a remarkable ability to create and revise content following current events. Using 973,940 revisions from 134,337 editors to 4,238 articles, this study examines the dynamics of the English Wikipedia's response to the coronavirus pandemic through the first five months of 2020 as a "quantitative portrait" describing the emergent collaborative behavior at three levels of analysis: article revision, editor contributions, and network dynamics. Across multiple data sources, quantitative methods, and levels of analysis, we find four consistent themes characterizing Wikipedia's unique large-scale, high-tempo, and temporary online collaborations: external events as drivers of activity, spillovers of activity, complex patterns of editor engagement, and the shadows of the future. In light of increasing concerns about online social platforms' abilities to govern the conduct and content of their users, we identify implications from Wikipedia's coronavirus collaborations for improving the resilience of socio-technical systems during a crisis.