New Research Brief: Online Community Resilience and Attacks on Public Information Goods

Throughout their lifecycles, the online communities that steward public information goods can face a range of threats to their sustainability. Over the course of its existence, Wikipedia, one of the most visible online knowledge commons, has battled the following challenges:

• Strategic degradation and pollution, through the introduction of misinformation and vandalism affecting its article base;
• Governance capture of some language projects by small groups of ideologically motivated editors;
• Commercial appropriation and disintermediation of its knowledge base by generative AI companies; and
• Escalating legitimacy attacks by partisan actors seeking to undermine the online encyclopedia’s perceived credibility as an information resource.

At our 11th Science of Community Dialogue on April 4th, which featured a conversation with Zarine Kharazian (University of Washington) and Professor Paul Gowder (Northwestern University), we discussed the role of online community governance in responding to these threats. Following up on this discussion, we are excited to share a research brief that both outlines some of the evolving threats that public information goods face as they mature and offers strategies that community leaders can adopt to address them. We hope that this synthesis inspires reflection and discussion on the nature of the public information goods various online communities maintain and the role of community governance institutions in defending the goods at stake and building public trust and legitimacy.