Declaring crisis? Temporal constructions of climate change on Wikipedia

Abstract

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.