Abstract
Wikipedia is a powerful platform for collective memory of social movements, and this paper seeks to replicate existing research on editor behaviour in Wikipedia on an ongoing international social movement. We analyze the attention and collaborative documentation of the Hong Kong Protests 2019 on the English language version of Wikipedia between 2019 and 2020. Our results indicate the presence of (1) intensified documentation and attention to Hong Kong Protest related articles, (2) suggest a lack of collaborative migration of editors between articles, (3) and found partial evidence that new events triggered dynamic re-appraisal of pre-existing articles. These findings corroborate with existing literature about the behaviours within editor communities of Wikipedia during breaking news events, but also complicate existing theories of collective memory on Wikipedia during a social movement, suggesting that the nature and motivations of the social movements influence and get reflected in the collective editing behaviour we see on Wikipedia.
Keywords: social movements, collaborative documentation, social computing, documentation patterns, Wikipedia, 2019 Hong Kong protests
Our Paper
Analyzing Collaborative Documentation of the Hong Kong Protests on Wikipedia