Eleições e deliberação pública na Wikipédia: um estudo dos verbetes dos candidatos à prefeitura de São Paulo

Abstract

Over the last decades, part of the debates surrounding the interface between Communication and Politics maintained focused on evaluating the ability of digital media as instruments to encourage participation. Following this direction, this research proposes to examine how certain digital communication mechanisms have been employed from the perspective of a self-built project through collaboration. Wikipedia, the subject of this work, is a free encyclopedia, a system in which multiple agents can participate, either writing or editing existing entries contents. It should be emphasized that collaborative modification of entries opens the possibility of holding a public debate (housed in the pages of exclusive thread for each theme) about the content of information that is made available to users. The specific questions guiding the research are: What are the impacts on the amount of hits and editions of some biographies when you have a tight election race? In what way are given the debates surrounding the drafting of the entries of the main candidates who ran for mayor of Sao Paulo, in 2012? The empirical corpus consists of three entries available in the encyclopedia, relating to the main candidates competing to be mayor of the city of São Paulo in 2012: “Celso Russomanno”, “Fernando Haddad” e “José Serra”. Methodologically, we chose an approach that has two dimensions: quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative analysis considers the interval between 2008 and 2012, exploring the contents of page views and trends of editions. The qualitative examination investigates, from elements of Deliberative Theory, collaboration and public deliberation on the three articles, studying the period 2012. The intention is to understand Wikipedia beyond its purely instrumental diagnostics: we believe ways to use this platform reflect in any way, the context and the local and/or national political culture. It was concluded that the context of the elections eventually influenced the dynamics of edits made on Wikipedia. Furthermore, it is possible to observe a notable increase in the amount of modifications and accesses to entries investigated here. It appears that the more users who edit are the same as more seek debate on talk pages. However, from the point of deliberative view, the discussion pages of the entries of these candidates had few discussions. The context of election has limitations with respect to rational discussion, since the goal of the users is to convince other “wikipedians” on the positive aspects of their candidates or on the negative characteristics of opponents.