  In their 2005 study, Adamic and Glance coined the memorable phrase "divided
they blog", referring to a trend of cyberbalkanization in the political
blogosphere, with liberal and conservative blogs tending to link to other blogs
with a similar political slant, and not to one another. As political discussion
and activity increasingly moves online, the power of framing political
discourses is shifting from mass media to social media. Continued examination
of political interactions online is critical, and we extend this line of
research by examining the activities of political users within the Wikipedia
community. First, we examined how users in Wikipedia choose to display (or not
to display) their political affiliation. Next, we more closely examined the
patterns of cross-party interaction and community participation among those
users proclaiming a political affiliation. In contrast to previous analyses of
other social media, we did not find strong trends indicating a preference to
interact with members of the same political party within the Wikipedia
community. Our results indicate that users who proclaim their political
affiliation within the community tend to proclaim their identity as a
"Wikipedian" even more loudly. It seems that the shared identity of "being
Wikipedian" may be strong enough to triumph over other potentially divisive
facets of personal identity, such as political affiliation.
