Abstract
Up to this point, we have articulated a synthesized model of organizational change, and we subsequently detailed some initial findings about the moments at which the organizational configuration of Wikipedia—or the manner in which that configuration was changing over time—shifted. In this chapter, we analyze the revisions made to key Wikipedia policy pages as well as contributions made to their associated “Talk” pages, in which editors discuss the revisions being made, in addition to larger societal events that may have affected Wikipedia. The findings of this archival search are used to assess the significant internal and external motors that acted upon the Wikipedia collaborative community to foster these configurational changes.
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Notes
- 1.
For the purposes of this assessment, multiple breakpoints occurring within 5 weeks of one another were considered to constitute a single breakpoint, as it would otherwise be impossible to properly distinguish the motors that affected different breakpoints in such close temporal proximity.
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Matei, S.A., Britt, B.C. (2017). Breakpoints and Concurrent Factors. In: Structural Differentiation in Social Media. Lecture Notes in Social Networks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64425-7_10
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