Variation in Strategies for Deleting Unusable Content Across the Major Wikimedia Projects

Abstract

One of the negative effects of the rapid development of the information society is the problem of the reliability of content created by millions of users on the Internet. Socially created Wikimedia projects, the largest of which is Wikipedia, quickly developed procedures for identifying and eliminating problematic content. The article presents an analysis of the procedures for removing articles and the discourse on deleting content conducted among active users of the ten largest language versions of Wikipedia. Previous research focused primarily on the lack of neutrality in making decisions about content to be deleted and the resulting social inequalities, and was usually limited to the English-language Wikipedia. Based on previous participant observation, we noticed that individual language versions have different solutions in the context of ensuring project quality, which results in the emergence of different types of problems. We therefore looked into how much the approaches to deleting articles differ in different language versions. At the same time, we attempt to identify the common characteristics of the users who most often initiate discussions about deleting articles. To do this, we analyzed Wikipedia pages used to debate articles submitted for deletion (AfD) in 10 of the largest language versions of this project. The guidelines for submitting articles, the content of automatically generated messages helpful in conducting discussions, and the specific design of the websites where the debates took place were taken into account. Moreover, for three language versions (French, Swedish, and Polish), a statistical analysis of the activity of users of these websites was performed. It was noticed that the procedures for running AfD websites were similar in the analyzed language versions, but they differed significantly in terms of design and automatically generated messages addressed to debate participants.