The Governance of French Political Biographies: Mapping Content Control and Editorial Authority on Wikipedia

As Wikipedia has become a space for the construction of political reputation, the governance of its biographical content has emerged as a critical concern for political communication and democratic integrity. While previous scholars have largely focused on edit wars, this paper proposes a shift toward the mechanisms of content control. We operationalize this control through a systematic analysis of revert interventions, investigating how editorial authority is distributed across contributors and whether these governance structures vary across distinct political fields. Utilizing a longitudinal dataset of 723,233 revisions to 2,837 Wikipedia biographical entries for French legislative candidates (2002–2024), we categorize these profiles into ideological clusters (e.g., left, center-right, far-right,etc.). To contextualize these quantitative findings, we adopt a mixed-methods approach complementing our analysis with semi-structured interviews conducted with seven of the fifty most active contributors within these clusters. Across all political clusters, we find that content control via revert interventions is highly unequal: a small fraction of contributors accounts for a disproportionate share of interventions, reflecting a general concentration of editorial authority. Moving beyond this aggregate distribution, we show however that the organization of content control differs concretely across political fields. Center-right and mainstream right clusters combine high volumes of content control with relatively broad and stable cores, indicating a pluralized governance where authority is exercised by a structured group rather than monopolized by a single actor. Whereas far-right pages exhibit a contrasting configuration that we characterize as high-alert governance where content control is concentrated within a small group of editors, yet labor is relatively evenly shared among them. Left-wing clusters, by comparison, display lower volumes of revert-based intervention and weaker stabilization of control roles. Deeper analysis highlights that governance is editor-centered but field-bounded, meaning that core controllers frequently intervene across multiple pages and sometimes across adjacent political clusters, rejecting a strictly page-local conception of governance, while stopping short of a single platform-wide elite. Qualitative interviews further elucidate these patterns by the identification of two primary editorial profiles. First are the political enthusiasts, whose interventions are motivated by intense monitoring of political news and a desire for ‘objectivity’, and generalist patrollers focused on broader platform maintenance and surveillance. Ultimately, we demonstrate that these divergent governance architectures are driven by two primary factors: the intensity of ideological contestation surrounding a page and the varying degrees of political activism among contributors. While the ‘high-alert’ configurations of far-right pages are associated with a higher potential for controversy and sustained vigilance, left-wing clusters are more often governed through diffuse and intermittent interventions carried out by generalist patrollers rather than stabilized enforcement cores. These findings reveal that while most revert-based interventions are carried out in the name of platform norms such as neutrality and verifiability, contributors nevertheless interpret and apply these norms in context-dependent ways. Qualitative evidence indicates that political sensitivity, media salience, and individual engagement levels shape how and when editors intervene, without reducing that governance to coordinated militant bias.