Research:The Information Behavior of Wikipedia Fan Editors: A Digital Autoethnography

Contact

Gen. Quon

no affiliation

(LIS PhD student at Emporia State University)

Duration:  2022-February – 2022-December

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Research:Projects

This page documents a completed research project.

Building off my past research on Wikipedia, this qualitative study seeks to document and discuss the information behavior of "fan editors" (that is, individuals who edit articles related to pop culture topics, such as films, TV shows, comics, etc.) on the site Wikipedia. Despite fan editors being among Wikipedia’s most active editors, hardly any attention has been paid to them by either library and information science (from here on, abbreviated as LIS) or fan studies. This is a surprising omission: For LIS researchers, Wikipedia is of paramount importance, given that it is one of the world's most heavily used reference sources. Likewise, for fan studies scholars, encyclopedic texts such as Wikipedia articles are, for many fan communities, important archives that enable information to be preserved and passed onto others.

Research questions

The broad research question guiding this project is as follows: What is the information behavior of fan editors on Wikipedia? In a more detailed manner, the question can be broken down as follows:

1. How do fan editors on Wikipedia seek out, select, and share information when editing the site?
2. What information hurdles do these editors encounter?
3. How do fan editors overcome these hurdles?
4. What implications do these findings have for the Price (2017) model of fan information behavior?

Methods

This project is a digital autoethnography, which will require me to engage in prolonged fieldwork editing Wikipedia, while also interviewing key informants—i.e., fan editors—whose insight will enable me to better understand their information strategies. As an autoethnography, this work requires critical self-analysis, which necessitates that I situate my own experiences alongside those of the people whom I am studying. Data collection for this project has three major components: fieldwork/participant observation, case study analysis, and interview methods.

Timeline

This project commenced on February 2022, and I plan to work on it until the end of the year. Intensive fieldwork will occur from February until August, and I will conduct interviews with select editors during the spring of 2022. Coding and thematic analysis will be conducted in the fall and winter of 2022.

Policy, Ethics and Human Subjects Research

This project is IRB-approved, and I plan on following Staeiou's ethnographic research protocol in order to reduce potential harm. Since this project is autoethnographic, I have largely been interacting with editors on Wikipedia like I always have (in other words, I have not done anything "out of the ordinary" that could be disruptive).

Results

In August 2024, the results of this project were published by Lexington Books as a monograph entitled The Information Behavior of Wikipedia Fan Editors A Digital (Auto)Ethnography. Issued as part of the "Communication Perspectives in Popular Culture" book series, the work:

... is a digital (auto)ethnography that documents the information behavior of Wikipedia “fan editors”—that is, individuals who edit articles about pop culture media. Given Wikipedia’s prominence in LIS and fan studies scholarship, both as one of the world’s most heavily used reference sources and as an important archive for fan communities, fan editors are a crucial component of this ecosystem as some of Wikipedia’s most active contributors. Through a combination of fieldwork observations, insight from key informants, and the author’s own experiences as a Wikipedia editor, this monograph provides a rich articulation of fan editor information behavior and offers a significant contribution to scholarship in a number of fields. Scholars of library and information science, media studies, fandom studies, and popular culture will find this book of particular interest.