Emotions in Wikipedia: the role of intended negative events in the expression of sadness and anger in online peer production

Hannah Greving, Joachim Kimmerle, Aileen Oeberst and Ulrike Cress

Behaviour and Information Technology, 2019, vol. 38, issue 8, 796-806

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

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/0144929X.2018.1554702 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:tbitxx:v:38:y:2019:i:8:p:796-806

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/tbit20

DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2018.1554702

Access Statistics for this article

Behaviour and Information Technology is currently edited by Dr Panos P Markopoulos

More articles in Behaviour and Information Technology from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().