Somewhat interesting new journal article:
*
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0060584
The researchers found that political discussions among openly
Wikipedians who declare a U.S. party affinity on their user pages don't
follow some of the common patterns observed in other online communities.
For example, researchers have documented that among bloggers, those
affiliated with the same party tend to discuss amongst each other much
more commonly (what they gloss as " cyberbalkanization"); and they also
reference the "other side's" in a way that's much more likely to be
argumentative, dismissive, and/or negative. But on Wikipedia neither
appears to be true: those who declare a U.S. party affiliation don't
seem to either segregate into more discussion with others on "their
side", or to have a clear pattern of more acrimonious interactions with
the "other" side than with "theirs".
Taken for whatever it's worth, of course. One hypothesis is the one the
paper offers, that our Wikipedian community identity trumps partisan
affiliation when it comes to guiding on-wiki interaction patterns. A
more skeptical hypothesis could be that the D/R split is actually,
unlike in the U.S. political blogosphere, not one of the more vicious
ones among Wikipedians to begin with, so is in a way an easier case. A
guess: a different fault line, like Israel/Palestine, might turn up less
positive results.
But in any case, it's an interesting read.
-Mark