Lost in Translation: Contexts, Computing, Disputing on Wikipedia

Wikipedia is an open collaboration, global, multilingual project. Its guidelines and policies direct the collaboration process into a vision of objective and neutral encyclopedic knowledge. However, coherence of that knowledge, and the outcomes of the collaborative process on the same topic, can sometimes vary dramatically across different languages. Our goal was to explore what these differences are, and to see how they are contextualized in a case of a contested and conflictive topic. The empirical focus was on the Republic of Kosovo, a recently formed country in Southeast Europe still seeking full international recognition. The study explores the social, cultural and political tensions through following the contextualization of this topic in three different Wikipedia communities: Serbian, Croatian and English. A constructivist (Charmaz, 1998) and substantive grounded theory of the process was created by following a two-step coding process. Three coders were active in different stages of the process. Discussions and comparisons of emergent codes, within and between three different communities, were conducted regularly. The core concept of our theory was neutrality dispute. It is based on four aspects: identities and viewpoints, their input into the process of content editing, relations between the editors, and the process of conflict management. The main drivers of conflict and/or consensus, within and across languages were different types of group identifications in relation to the topic of Kosovo and Wikipedia in general. Wiki software and Wikipedia's rules help in managing multiple conflicts, although the political and cultural contentiousness of the topic existing in the Ë offlineË context was also reproduced in the collaborative process.publishedye