Papers › The role of online attention in the supply of disinformation in Wikipedia
The role of online attention in the supply of disinformation in Wikipedia
Anis Elebiary, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Wikipedia and many User-Generated Content (UGC) communities are known for producing reliable, quality content, but also for being vulnerable to false or misleading information. Previous work has shown that many hoaxes on Wikipedia go undetected for extended periods of time. But little is known about the creation of intentionally false or misleading information online. Does collective attention toward a topic increase the likelihood it will spawn disinformation? Here, we measure the relationship between allocation of attention and the production of hoax articles on the English Wikipedia. Analysis of traffic logs reveals that, compared to legitimate articles created on the same day, hoaxes tend to be more associated with traffic spikes preceding their creation. This is consistent with the idea that the supply of false or misleading information on a topic is driven by the attention it receives. These findings improve our comprehension of the determinants of disinformation in UGC communities and could help promote the integrity of knowledge on Wikipedia.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections