[Les matins du -JPEG] "Wikipedia caught up in politics? Questioning encyclopaedic neutrality through the study of candidate biographies", by Victor Planche

The Laboratoire des sciences Juridiques, Politique, Économiques et de Gestion is pleased to welcome as part of the "Matins du -JPEG" 2025 :

Victor Planche - Doctoral student in political science

for a talk entitled :

"Wikipedia caught up in politics?
Questioning encyclopaedic neutrality by studying candidates' biographical notes".

While Wikipedia has built its public success on its ability to produce reliable content, the neutrality of its content remains open to question. This is what we intend to show by looking at the politics pages of the encyclopaedia. Researchers in political science have already been able to show how ambiguous the neutrality of accounts of political personnel is. On the one hand, it is assumed that politicians control the way in which they appear to the public through a constant process of representation that enables them to impose a strategic identity on those who cover them in the media. On the other hand, the journalists who write these accounts traditionally try to adopt a distant stance towards the political game to avoid representing the political players as they would wish to be represented. Wikipedia appears to be a place where this tension between an objective narrative written by contributors with an ethos similar to that of journalists, known as Wikipedians, and a promotional narrative written by candidates or activists, can be re-examined. Because of its collaborative aspect, Wikipedia allows these two categories of agents to contribute to the same biographical records at the same time. Our problem is therefore to examine the way in which the image projected of candidates on Wikipedia becomes a battleground between several actors seeking to manipulate it for promotional or informative purposes.

• We will begin by looking at how political communication on Wikipedia has evolved and the extent to which the encyclopaedia has become an integral part of candidates' campaign arsenal. Secondly, we will look more closely at biographical writing in Wikipedia. The aim will be to show what arguments Wikipedians and members of the political staff use to modify the pages, and whether they differ in the forms of comments they add to the encyclopaedia.
• We will look at the possibility that the editorial battle between these two types of actor has already been overdetermined, given that the biographical account of political staff is largely pre-formatted and therefore limited.

The discussion will be led by Gaël DepoorterMCF in Political Science (-JPEG-AU)

The meeting will take place on Friday 10 January 2025 at 10.00 a.m. in room 1W48