Abstract
The fast-growing body of research on internet censorship has examined the effects of censoring selective pieces of political information and the unintended consequences of censorship of entertainment. However, we know very little about the broader consequences of coarse censorship or censorship that affects a large array of information such as an entire website or search engine. In this study, we use China’s complete block of Chinese language Wikipedia ( zh.wikipedia.org ) on May 19, 2015, to disaggregate the effects of coarse censorship on proactive consumption of information—information users seek out—and on incidental consumption of information—information users are not actively seeking but consume when they happen to come across it. We quantify the effects of censorship of Wikipedia not only on proactive information consumption but also on opportunities for exploration and incidental consumption of information. We find that users from mainland China were much more likely to consume information on Wikipedia about politics and history incidentally rather than proactively, suggesting that the effects of censorship on incidental information access may be politically significant.
Highlights
Wikipedia—a wiki-based website where users collaboratively modify content and structure—is one of the most widely viewed sites in the world.1 As of November 2018, Wikipedia had more than 49 million pages in nearly 300 languages.2 Wikipedia content is user generated and changes over time, studies have consistently shown Wikipedia to be an accurate source of a very wide variety of information.3In this article, we use China’s complete block of Chinese language Wikipedia on May 19, 2015, to understand how coarse censorship—censorship that is not selectively aimed at suppressing one specific type of content—influences the overall consumption of information
We find that censorship affects information that users seek out proactively and has dramatic effects on incidental consumption of information—in this case, information that Wikipedia users accessed through the homepage
Using automated methods to analyze the content of these Chinese Wikipedia pages, we find that exploration on Wikipedia via the homepage inspired mainland users to incidentally consume a broad array of information, about the cultures, histories, and politics of countries beyond China
Summary
Wikipedia—a wiki-based website where users collaboratively modify content and structure—is one of the most widely viewed sites in the world.1 As of November 2018, Wikipedia had more than 49 million pages in nearly 300 languages.2 Wikipedia content is user generated and changes over time, studies have consistently shown Wikipedia to be an accurate source of a very wide variety of information.3In this article, we use China’s complete block of Chinese language Wikipedia (zh.wikipedia.org) on May 19, 2015, to understand how coarse censorship—censorship that is not selectively aimed at suppressing one specific type of content—influences the overall consumption of information.
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