Emotions in Wikipedia

The role of intended negative events in the expression of sadness and anger in online peer production

authored by

Hannah Greving, Joachim Kimmerle, Aileen Oeberst, Ulrike Cress

Abstract

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia has strict guidelines for ensuring the objectivity of its content and unbiased language of its articles. Wikipedia also provides articles on negative events such as disasters. Depending on the event, the Wikipedia community may express certain emotions when writing Wikipedia articles on those events. So far, it is unclear which psychological mechanisms are reflected in the potential emotional expressions. Based on appraisal theories of specific emotions and on previous research on intentional harm, we investigated whether intentional negative events such as terrorist attacks elicited different emotional expressions than unintentional negative events, such as natural or man-made disasters. We analysed N = 330 Wikipedia articles with automatic linguistic text analyses and found that Wikipedia articles on man-made attacks (e.g. terrorist attacks, shooting rampages) contained more anger-related content than Wikipedia articles on man-made disasters (e.g. ship accidents, train accidents) and natural disasters (e.g. hurricanes, flooding); F (2, 327) = 127.78, p 

External Organisation(s)

Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien (IWM)
University of Tübingen
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz

Type

Article

Journal

Behaviour & Information Technology

Volume

38

Pages

796-806

No. of pages

11

Publication date

2019

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

General Social Sciences, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Human-Computer Interaction

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929x.2018.1554702 (Access: Closed)