'Is' to 'Was': Coordination and Commemoration in Posthumous Activity on Wikipedia Biographies
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.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
When people of public interest die, this usually leads to a sharp rise in media attention and social media activity that decays in a matter of days and rises again at anniversaries and special dates related to the deceased individual.
“When people of public interest die, this usually leads to a sharp rise in media attention and social media activity that decays in a matter of days (West et al., 2021) and rises again at anniversaries and special dates related to the deceased individual (cf.Ferron & Massa, 2014;Keegan & Brubaker, 2015).”
From Understanding Autobiographical Memory in the Digital Age: The AMEDIA-Model (2024) · cites this paper as Keegan & Brubaker, 2015
Cites
Decentralization in wikipedia governance.
Forte, A., Larco, V., & Bruckman, A. (2009) · Journal of Management Information Systems · doi:10.2753/mis0742-1222260103 · Cited by 300 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia: Collective Memory and Collaboration around Online Social Movements
Twyman, M., Keegan, B. C., & Shaw, A. (2017) · Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing · doi:10.1145/2998181.2998232 · Cited by 51 · see citing works
Self-citationUnderstanding Autobiographical Memory in the Digital Age: The AMEDIA-Model
Hutmacher, F., Appel, M., & Schwan, S. (2024) · Psychological Inquiry · doi:10.1080/1047840x.2024.2384125 · Cited by 12 · see citing works
- Authors
- Keegan, B. C., & Brubaker, J. R.
- Affiliations
- Northeastern University (US)
- University of California, Irvine (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2015-02-28
- Pages
- 533-546
- OpenAlex
- W2151659907
- Cited by
- 20
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 1 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 1 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 1
- FWCI
- 4.12
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Communication › Wikis in Education and Collaboration
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Death, Funerary Practices, and Mourning
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
- Keywords
- Wikipedia, death work, commemoration, posthumous editing, peer production, thanatology, memory spaces, data stewardship
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
