'Is' to 'Was'

Abstract

Following the deaths of notable people, Wikipedians incorporate this new knowledge by updating or creating biographical articles. Drawing on literature from death studies and peer production, we demonstrate how the creation of these "wiki-bituaries" requires complex coordination work and highlight processes of commemoration and memorialization within socio-technical systems. Using the corpus of 6,132 articles about people who died in 2012, we examine the network relationships and contribution dynamics of users who perform this work and identify behavioral and content dynamics on the biographical articles about the deceased. The collaborations that emerge from posthumous editing of these biographies are sites of significant activity that coalesce into complex but temporary collaborations. Based on these findings, we argue that Wikipedia has re-imagined the obituary into a genre for creating memory spaces in which the death of a subject prompts a form of "death work" involving the collective re-evaluation of article content and a transition into a new mode of data stewardship.

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Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.