Egalitarians at the gate: one-sided gatekeeping practices in social media

Authors:
Brian Keegan;Darren Gergle
Affiliations:
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Year:
2010

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Abstract

Although Wikipedia has increasingly attracted attention for its in-depth and timely coverage of breaking news stories, the social dynamics of how Wikipedia editors process breaking news items has not been systematically examined. Through a 3-month study of 161 deliberations over whether a news item should appear on Wikipedia's front page, we demonstrate that elite users fulfill a unique gatekeeping role that permits them to leverage their community position to block the promotion of inappropriate items. However, these elite users are unable to promote their supported news items more effectively than other types of editors. These findings suggest that "one-sided gatekeeping" may reflect a crucial stasis in social media where the community has to balance the experience of its elite users while encouraging contributions from non-elite users.