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The wisdom of polarized crowds
Feng Shi1,2, Misha Teplitskiy3,4, Eamon Duede2,5
1Odum Institute for Research in Social Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Nature Human Behaviour
|April 12, 2019
Summary
Ideologically diverse teams, even those with strong political views, create higher-quality Wikipedia articles. Balanced polarization fosters constructive debate and better content, challenging assumptions about political division.
Area of Science:
- Social Sciences
- Computational Social Science
- Political Science
Background:
- Rising political polarization in the United States presents challenges for cooperation.
- Diverse perspectives generally enhance team performance on complex tasks.
- However, strong political views can lead to conflict and reluctance to engage with opposing ideas.
Discussion:
- This study analyzed millions of Wikipedia edits to assess the impact of ideological composition on article quality.
- Editor's online ideological leanings were determined by their contributions to conservative versus liberal articles.
- Editor surveys indicated a correlation between online contributions and offline political affiliation and identity.
Key Insights:
- Polarized teams with a balanced mix of ideologically diverse editors produced higher-quality Wikipedia articles than homogeneous teams.
- This effect was observed across political, social issues, and science articles.
- Ideologically polarized teams engaged in longer, more constructive, and substantively focused debates on article talk pages.
Outlook:
- Analysis of Wikipedia talk pages revealed that ideologically diverse teams had more constructive, competitive, and linguistically diverse debates.
- Intensified use of Wikipedia policies by diverse teams suggests institutional design principles can harness polarization's power.
- Findings suggest that structured environments can leverage ideological diversity for improved collaborative outcomes.
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