Editorial governance under pressure: Wikipedia's revert dynamics during the 2024 US election

Outlet Title

Humanities and Social Science Communications

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

5-13-2026

Abstract

Wikipedia is an essential source of information online, making the integrity of its content critical to the health of the information ecosystem. Yet few studies have examined how Wikipedia’s volunteer-driven editorial governance responds to pressure during politically sensitive periods. We address this gap by investigating editing dynamics on US politicians’ Wikipedia pages during the 2024 presidential election cycle. Using a combination of quantitative methods—including revert risk prediction and change point detection—and qualitative manual annotation of over 1700 edits, we analyse how editorial activity, revert patterns, and governance mechanisms respond to major political events. Our results show that both edit volume and revert risk escalate significantly during key political moments, with Republican-affiliated pages—particularly Donald Trump’s—receiving substantially more editing activity and higher revert risk than Democratic counterparts. Wikipedia’s reversion mechanisms respond swiftly to high-risk edits, but lower-risk problematic content can persist for extended periods. Manual annotation revealed that while overt misinformation was rare in our sample (approximately 1% of coded edits), the cases identified were disproportionately characterised by biased language rather than factual inaccuracies, suggesting that subtler forms of manipulation pose the greater challenge.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Giuliano Formisano

  2. Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Giuliano Formisano

  3. Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Giuliano Formisano & Prathm Juneja

  4. Digital Ethics Center, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Emmie Hine, Joel Laitila, Claudio Novelli, Ethan Chiu, Elizabeth Dejanikus, Madeline Levin, Tyler Schroder, Andrew West & Luciano Floridi

  5. Department of Legal Studies, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Emmie Hine & Luciano Floridi

  6. Centre for IT & IP Law (CiTiP), KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Emmie Hine

  7. Beacom College of Computer & Cyber Sciences, Dakota State University, Madison, SD, USA

    Tyler Schroder

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giuliano Formisano.

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