Edit Wars: Framing Contests, Argument Structure, and the Meaning of Inequality at Wikipedia

Collaborative knowledge platforms like Wikipedia influence how individuals understand and interpret issues, yet how the meaning of issues is co-constructed on such platforms is poorly understood. Drawing from a longitudinal study of the discussion of inequality on Wikipedia’s “Capitalism” page, we uncover the process of collective meaning making around contentious issues on collaborative knowledge platforms. Incorporating insights from research on framing and argument structure, we demonstrate how new frames of inequality gain traction on the page. Through an analysis of the frontstage framing contests and backstage negotiations between opposing editors, we find that factors such as emotivity and the characteristics of the frame articulator that can support frame traction in other settings work against it at Wikipedia. Instead, we show how frame traction on these platforms is supported by external social movement activity that stimulates the creation of discursive resources that advance specific frames and the addition of subjective qualifiers that make claims advancing certain frames more palatable to opposing editors. We discuss the implications of these empirical discoveries for research on collaborative platforms and for wider scholarship on collective meaning making around contentious issues.