Research project

Citizen and elite activity on Wikipedia

This project, led by Simon Munzert, aims to study activity on Wikipedia – by politicians on the one hand and ordinary voters on the other. For political elites, Wikipedia’s popularity and reputation makes it an attractive medium for communication and campaigning. Citizens can use the platform to gather information about political issues as well as elites and thereby inform their political decisions and preferences. Fortunately, Wikipedia stores every detail of these interactions in edit histories which are accessible to the public, providing systematic information about the date, type, and source of each edit. Using this unique information, the project aims to yield insights into strategic behaviour of political elites as well as into the role of Wikipedia in digital campaigning and public attention in general. Furthermore, the richness of the data allows for the generation of new measures of political behaviour.

Funding

This project has received 40,000 EUR in funding from the Daimler and Benz Foundation. Simon Munzert is part of the 2017 cohort of postdoctoral fellows supported by the foundation.

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Duration

2017-2019

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Project lead