Decoding revision mechanisms in Wikipedia: Collaboration, moderation, and collectivities

Research on knowledge collaboration in Wikipedia has predominately focused on metadata at the article level or editor-centric analyses, often overlooking the complexities of knowledge collaboration and its contextual dependencies. This study takes a novel, fine-grained approach to investigating revision mechanisms in Wikipedia’s knowledge collaboration. By considering modified sentences as carriers of collective knowledge and spaces in which epistemic power is negotiated, it reconstructs their revision sequences and examines how editorial, contextual, content, and temporal factors shape Wikipedia’s revision dynamics. A total of 140,593 revisions (by 48,643 editors) of 76,525 sentences in 537 Wikipedia articles related to climate change were analyzed using text mining, natural language processing, survival analysis, and meta-analysis. The findings expand our understanding of how epistemic power is negotiated through collective endeavors underlying bureaucratic rules and community moderation in Wikipedia.