UCLA

As more people have shifted from conventional media to user-generated platforms such as Wikipedia for accessing information, concerns have grown about how knowledge is collaboratively created and shaped—particularly regarding source credibility, editorial transparency, and the potential biases or perspectives that the resulting information may inevitably incorporate. These concerns are further complexified when multiple wiki-type entries exist on the same subjects in different languages or authored from different geopolitical spaces. This research examined how editors of wiki-based platforms wrestle with what are often contentious and conflicting positionality concerns, specifically those relating to value neutrality and diversity, in different national, cultural, linguistic, and transcultural and trans-linguistic contexts. Using a mixed-methods approach that integrates quantitative text analysis with in-depth interviews with editors, this research investigated how knowledge is produced and contested in the English, Korean and Chinese editions of Wikipedia across both general and politically sensitive topics, as well as how socio-technical dynamics shape knowledge production on these platforms. The findings suggest that editors’ personal motivations and social and cultural affiliations not only shape the content they produce but also contribute to broader platform-level differences in how information is structured, contested and sustained over time. The findings also identified the presence of informal or tacit editorial hierarchies that reflect broader social structures. These hierarchies are influenced by various factors, including the duration of editors’ experiences, their level of engagement, their perceived authority or standing within their self-identified community and their cultural or political affiliations. These hierarchies in turn shape which knowledge is considered credible and whose voices are heard in the course of collaborative knowledge production. Furthermore, the findings demonstrated how many editors strike a precarious balance between leveraging the platform’s extensive reach and protecting their own security, while simultaneously minimizing personal exposure to various risks, including surveillance, harassment and reputational harm. In this negotiation, editors often employed tactics such as anonymity, selective disclosure, and adherence to moderation policies to mitigate risks, all while being engaged in an implicit social contract with Wikipedia—one that frames the problem based on its existing rules and norms and offers a certain degree of communal protection. The fragile and contingent balancing acts that editors undertake are continually recalibrated in response to shifting perceptions of both opportunity and risk. This dynamic also highlights a fundamental yet often overlooked reciprocity—while editors depend on Wikipedia as an accessible platform for their contributions and visibility, Wikipedia itself is also dependent on its volunteer editors for sustaining its content production, credibility, and ongoing relevance. The platform’s infrastructure and community governance are thus not merely top-down systems but are also deeply intertwined with the labor, motivations and vulnerabilities of its contributors. Understanding this mutual reliance complicates simplistic notions of platform neutrality and emphasizes the need to critically examine how platforms and users co-construct the informational landscapes they inhabit. By elucidating the intricate socio-technical dynamics that shape knowledge production and drawing out the methodological considerations in conducting translingual and transcultural research in dynamic online environments, this study offers an empirical framework for understanding how user-generated information is constructed, governed and negotiated across multilingual and culturally diverse platforms.