Affordance Perception Across Languages and Memories: A Study of Wikipedia Editors on the ‘Arab Spring’ Article

Overview

How do different language communities remember the same global event online—and who gets to shape that memory? This project explores how Wikipedia, one of the world’s most powerful platforms for public knowledge, plays a central role in shaping collective memory. Focusing on how the “Arab Spring” is represented in English and Arabic Wikipedia, I analyze how features like hyperlinks, edit histories, and interlanguage links influence which stories are told, which voices are centered, and how events are connected. Far from being a passive archive, Wikipedia actively constructs memory—and editors are at the heart of that process.

But collective memory isn’t just written through code or algorithms—it’s created by people like you. In addition to analyzing Wikipedia’s structure, this project includes a survey and optional opt-in follow-up interviews with 100 English-language and 100 Arabic-language editors of the Arab Spring article. These conversations focus on how editors perceive and use Wikipedia’s tools: How do they decide what deserves a link? What context matters? How do their views evolve over time? By listening directly to contributors, this project highlights the incredible thought and care editors bring to shaping public knowledge.

This research shows that editing Wikipedia is more than just fixing grammar or adding facts—it’s participating in the living memory of global events. Whether one’s deciding what context to include, navigating different language editions, or linking articles in ways that make meaning, choices help shape how the world remembers its past. By contributing, people are not just writing history—they’re helping build a more inclusive, thoughtful, and connected version of it.

Literature Motivation and Gap

Prior research has extensively documented Wikipedia editing practices and editor behaviors. For example, Yang et al. (2016) examine general editing behaviors such as ”Clarification”, specifying or explaining an existing fact or meaning by example or discussion without adding new information, ”Counter Vandalism”, reverting or removing vandalism, and more with the goal of investigating the overall editing environment [1]. Iba et al. (2010) discusses the emergence of editing patterns around Wikipedia topics paticularly focussing on ”egoboosters” and ”coolfarmers”, two types of editing styles that reflect motivation and actions of various Wikipedia editors [2]. These studies contribute to a growing understanding of how collaborative knowledge production unfolds on the platform, particularly in relation to community norms, editorial hierarchies, and content moderation practices. However, much of this work focuses on what editors do, rather than how they interact with the platform’s structural features to carry out their work. There has been limited attention to how editors perceive and engage with Wikipedia’s built-in affordances, such as hyperlinking, Talk Pages, or interlanguage links, as tools for shaping not only content, but also memory and narrative.

At the same time, there is a growing body of work also highlights significant differences in content across language editions of Wikipedia [4][5], and the role of multilingual editors in bridging these linguistic silos [3]. While these studies suggest that linguistic and cultural contexts shape Wikipedia’s content, less attention has been paid to how editing norms themselves might vary across languages and whether these normative differences contribute to the divergences observed in multilingual article content.

In-depth qualitative work has examined how narratives evolve on Wikipedia through the lens of editors. For instance, Ford (2022) offers a detailed account of the editorial dynamics surrounding the English Wikipedia article on the Arab Spring, analyzing how specific editors shaped narrative construction over time. This work highlights Wikipedia as an active site of memory-making, where contributors negotiate which events, actors, and perspectives are preserved [6]. However, this analysis is limited to a single language edition and does not investigate the potential influence of language-specific editing norms on narrative formation. In combination, this presents a significant gap in our understanding of the norms surrounding collective memory constructed on multilingual platforms like Wikipedia and how they may vary between languages. Without attending to the cultural and linguistic dimensions of editorial practice, we risk overlooking the deeper normative forces that produce divergent historical accounts. Addressing this gap is crucial for interpreting cross-lingual content disparities and for informing future research. both qualitative and computational, on how platform infrastructures mediate memory across different language communities.

Research Question

Understanding how editors interpret their roles, how they engage with the platform’s structural features and how they perceive the purpose of Wikipedia itself is essential for explaining persistent cross-lingual differences in content and narrative. Concepts like imagined affordances and structuration theory offer useful frameworks for investigating these dynamics but empirical work comparing such interpretations across language communities remains limited. Therefore, I pose this research question:

** How do Wikipedia editors across English and Arabic language editions of the “Arab Spring” article differ in their perceptions of platform affordances, editorial roles, and collective memory practices?** 

By looking across platform affordance perceptions, roles, and collective memory broadly, I hope to investigate many aspects of editor perception that might influence the collective memory evolution and construction within the platform of Wikipedia. Perception of platform affordances will identify motivations in leveraging them when editing and when consuming, providing additional content to resulting digital trace data. Investigating how editors perceive themselves and their roles within Wikipedia’s infrastructure reveals any motivations or biases within the construction of an article. Then their overall perception of collective memory practices on Wikipedia will let me know not only the relevance of the concept to editors but could reveal role perception within editor offline communities.

Contributors

• H. Laurie Jones Lawson, PhD Candidate, Information Science, University of Colorado
• Alexandra Siegel, Associate Professor, Political Science, University of Colorado
• Heather Ford, Associate Professor, Digital and Social Media, University of Technology Sydney

Citations

1. Diyi Yang, Aaron Halfaker, Robert Kraut, and Eduard Hovy. Identifying Semantic Edit Inten- tions from Revisions in Wikipedia. In Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, and Sebastian Riedel, editors, Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2000–2010, Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2017. Association for Com- putational Linguistics.

2. Takashi Iba, Keiichi Nemoto, Bernd Peters, and Peter A. Gloor. Analyzing the Creative Editing Behavior of Wikipedia Editors: Through Dynamic Social Network Analysis. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2(4):6441–6456, January 2010.

3. Scott A. Hale. Multilinguals and Wikipedia editing. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science, WebSci ’14, pages 99–108, New York, NY, USA, June 2014. Association for Computing Machinery.

4. Shiqing He, Allen Yilun Lin, Eytan Adar, and Brent Hecht. The tower of babel.jpg: Diversity of Visual Encyclopedic Knowledge Across Wikipedia Language Editions. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 12(1), June 2018. Number: 1.

5. Paolo Massa and Federico Scrinzi. Manypedia: comparing language points of view of Wikipedia communities. In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, WikiSym ’12, pages 1–9, New York, NY, USA, August 2012. Association for Computing Machinery.

6. Heather Ford and Ethan Zuckerman. Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and the Survival of Facts in the Digital Age. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 2022.