Collaboration of Open Content News in Wikipedia: The Role and Impact of Gatekeepers

With the advances of social technologies, open content in social media has become an important place where people gather and communicate news. Prior studies in conventional mass media has long studied the news reporting process, and suggest that gatekeepers – editors or journalists who control the information and have a unique power to determine what gets published to the public – play an important role in the news reporting process. However, as the process of how open content are created by contributors in social media platforms is different, what we understand about content publication process in traditional mass media can not directly apply in the context of social media. Especially, it is unclear who are the gatekeepers and how do they influence the content creation and spread of information in social media. In the current proposed study, I aim to understand this new model of content generation process through the lens of gatekeepers in social media platforms such as Wikipedia. Specifically, I aim to discover ways to identify gatekeepers and assess their impact on information quality and content polarization.