Who Decides What Stays and Why? Participation, Authority, and Rationales in Chinese Wikipedia’s Deletion Discussions
Authors: Tianyu Gao (City University of New York), Ping Ji (City University of New York)
Year: 2026
Issue: 2
Pages: 52–61
Abstract: Chinese Wikipedia (zh-wiki), the largest Chinese-language encyclopedia not under state control, decides whether to keep or delete articles through open deliberations: editors argue by citing policies, and a closer, an editor who reviews the full discussion and renders a binding decision on the article’s fate. But who actually participates in these discussions, how concentrated is the decision-making authority, what topics are contested, and what rationales drive the outcomes? We analyze 47,030 Articles for Deletion (AfD) discussion cases from Chinese Wikipedia spanning 2020 to 2024. We find that while hundreds of editors participate each year, closing authority is concentrated in a small and shrinking pool of closers, with a single individual responsible for up to 89.9% of substantive decisions in one year. Using diagnostic Unicode characters to classify editors by script preference (whether they write in traditional or simplified Chinese characters, a signal of regional origin and, by extension, whether they operate under internet censorship), we find that traditional-script editors outnumber simplified-script editors by 1.2–1.8:1, even though simplified Chinese speakers outnumber traditional Chinese speakers by roughly 45:1 globally. Yet deletion outcomes show no consistent directional bias favoring either community. Biography, media, list, and geography articles dominate nominations. Notability is the dominant rationale across all outcome types, and over a quarter of deletions contain no explicit rationale. These findings characterize a governance system where broad community participation coexists with highly concentrated decision-making authority, raising questions about the relationship between deliberative process design and the distribution of actual outcomes.
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