How Wikipedia responds to breaking news
- Joe Sutherland is a Wikimedia Foundation communications intern.
For almost fifteen years, the scope of topics that Wikipedia covers has grown steadily. Now, the free online encyclopedia covers everything from music, film, and video games to geography, history, and the sciences. It also contains articles on topics trending in the news, updated by tens of thousands of volunteer editors as swiftly as the news breaks.
To investigate aspects of this phenomenon, such as the speed with which breaking news is covered on Wikipedia, the verifiability of information added over time, and the distribution of edits among Wikipedia’s editors, I selected an article for further analysis in the form of a dissertation.[1]
The article selected was "Shooting of Michael Brown", which covered the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, by police officer Darren Wilson. The incident attracted much press attention fueled by local protest in the suburb of St. Louis. I observed the article's history until January 12, 2015.
The resulting data was split into two "peaks" in the development of this story: the initial media scramble after protests began in mid-August, and the Ferguson grand jury's decision not to indict Wilson for the teenager's death in late November.[2] Each "peak" represented 500 individual revisions of the article in question. The use of peaks in this case allowed for cross-case analysis—that is, a direct comparison between two case studies.
- ^ If you’re interested in reading the full thesis, it’s available from my website. Others have done research into this area; their work, methods and outcomes heavily influenced this study. In particular, Brian Keegan's work was instrumental in guiding the direction for this research. His 2013 study into breaking news, co-authored with Darren Gergle and Noshir Contractor, covers a far wider range than this thesis did.
- ^ The first peak depicted is the 500 edits made between 09:38 UTC on 16 August 2014 and 17:54 UTC on 18 August 2014 (a period of 2 days, 8 hours and 16 minutes); the second is between 00:57 UTC on 23 November 2014 and 22:36 UTC on 01 December 2014 (a period of 8 days, 21 hours and 39 minutes).