Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia: Collaboration and Collective Memory around Online Social Movements

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 coverage of new events, and (3) dynamically re-appraise pre-existing 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.

Covid-19 and Collective Memory Among Malaysians: Does Generation Matter?

“…Previous studies on collective memory have been carried out in retrospect at the end of the event from a distant point in time. Studies on the collective memory of ongoing events are severely lacking except for a few studies by Twyman et al (2017), who explored collaboration and collective memory of Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia. Results indicated intensified documentation, dynamic re-appraisal, and content curation on BLM in Wikipedia over time, reflecting the important role of "Wikipedia as a depository of collective memory" using revision history and pageview data (Luyt, 2015(Luyt, , p. 1956.…”

Understanding Wikipedia Practices Through Hindi, Urdu, and English Takes on an Evolving Regional Conflict

“…As a user gains more experience, Wikipedia as a whole becomes more important than any individual article: users then tend to adopt specialized roles (e.g., administrator) and use the facilities for discussing with other editors and tracking changes to articles. Keegan (2015) has studied how Wikipedia editors collectively respond to breaking news events, and Twyman et al (2016) studied the same phenomenon as it related specifically to the Black Lives Matter movement. New events, even if not directly related to the article at hand, will spur more page views, as well as edits that put the topic in the context of the new event.…”

"This is why we play"

“…Romero et al [43] find that communication networks between traders "turtle" up during shocks in stock price and reveal relations between social network structure and collective behavior. Other offline events studies include the dynamics of breaking news [26,27,31], celebrity death [15,28], and Black Lives Matter [52,59]. This literature illustrates that online communities do not only exist in the virtual world.…”