Conference Paper: “Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia: Collaboration and Collective Memory around Online Social Movements”

The following paper was recently shared on arXiv.
Title
Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia: Collaboration and Collective Memory around Online Social Movements
Authors
Marlon Twyman
Northwestern University
Brian C. Keegan
Univ. of Colorado, Boulder
Aaron Shaw
Northwestern University
Source
via arXiv
To be Presented at: CSCW ’17, February 25 – March 01, 2017, Portland, OR
Abstract

Social movements use social computing systems to complement offline mobilizations, but prior literature has focused almost exclusively on movement actors’ use of social media.
In this paper, we analyze participation and attention to topics connected with the Black Lives Matter movement in the English language version of Wikipedia between 2014 and 2016.
Our results point to the use of Wikipedia to (1) intensively document and connect historical and contemporary events, (2) collaboratively migrate activity to support coverag of new events, and (3) dynamically re-appraise preexisting knowledge in the aftermath of new events. These findings reveal patterns of behavior that complement theories of collective memory and collective action and help explain how social computing systems can encode and retrieve knowledge about social movements as they unfold.

Direct to Full Text Paper (13 pages; PDF)

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