Steiert Olivia
The New School for Social Research, USA.
Public Underst Sci. 2025 Feb;34(2):188-203. doi: 10.1177/09636625241268890. Epub 2024 Sep 9.
On Wikipedia, editors daily negotiate edits to an entry that summarizes climate change to a global audience. The outcome of their efforts is an encyclopedic entry with a conspicuous lack of temporal clarity that circumvents the question of whether climate change is an immediate crisis or merely a potential future phenomenon. This qualitative discourse analysis of editors' debates around climate change on Wikipedia argues that their hesitancy to "declare crisis" is not a conscious editorial choice as much as an outcome of a friction between the folk philosophy of science Wikipedia is built upon, editors' own sense of urgency, and their anticipations about audience uptake of their writing. This friction shapes a group style that fosters temporal ambiguity. Hence, the findings suggest that in the Wikipedia entry on climate change, platform affordances and contestation of expertise foreclose a declaration of climate crisis.
在维基百科上，编辑们每天都在协商对一篇向全球受众总结气候变化的条目进行编辑。他们努力的结果是一篇百科条目，明显缺乏时间清晰度，回避了气候变化是当下危机还是仅仅是未来潜在现象的问题。对维基百科上编辑们围绕气候变化展开的辩论进行的这种定性话语分析表明，他们不愿“宣布危机”与其说是一种有意识的编辑选择，不如说是维基百科所基于的民间科学哲学、编辑自身的紧迫感以及他们对读者接受其文章的预期之间摩擦的结果。这种摩擦形成了一种助长时间模糊性的群体风格。因此，研究结果表明，在维基百科关于气候变化的条目中，平台特性和对专业知识的争议排除了对气候危机的宣告。
