It’s not an encyclopedia, it’s a market of agendas: Decentralized agenda networks between Wikipedia and global news media from 2015 to 2020

Many innovative forms of media entered the online mediascape and can potentially set public agendas. This study drew on peer-produced news content on Wikipedia and theorized its unprecedented agenda building power within a network of diverse media sources. Adopting the network agenda-setting model, this study collected comprehensive global news coverage and Wikipedia coverage of top US political news events from 2015 to 2020. Time series analysis found that none of the media types (Wikipedia, elite media, and non-elite media) exhibited dominant agenda-setting power, while each of them can lead the agenda in certain circumstances. Wikipedia was a critical agenda setter for other media entities, and it also reflected the public’s collective evaluation of existing news agendas from multiple sources. This article proposed a multi-agent and multidirectional network architecture to describe agenda-setting relationships. We also highlighted four unique characteristics of Wikipedia that matter for digital journalism.