Beyond opening up the black box: Investigating the role of algorithmic systems in Wikipedian organizational culture

Scholars and practitioners across domains are increasingly concerned with algorithmic transparency and opacity, interrogating the values and assumptions embedded in automated, black-boxed systems, particularly in user-generated content platforms. I report from an ethnography of infrastructure in Wikipedia to discuss an often understudied aspect of this topic: the local, contextual, learned expertise involved in participating in a highly automated social-technical environment. Today, the organizational culture of Wikipedia is deeply intertwined with various data-driven algorithmic systems, which Wikipedians rely on to help manage and govern the "anyone can edit" encyclopedia at a massive scale. These bots, scripts, tools, plugins, and dashboards make Wikipedia more efficient for those who know how to work with them, but like all organizational culture, newcomers must learn them if they want to fully participate. I illustrate how cultural and organizational expertise is enacted around algorithmic agents by discussing two autoethnographic vignettes, which relate my personal experience as a veteran in Wikipedia. I present thick descriptions of how governance and gatekeeping practices are articulated through and in alignment with these automated infrastructures. Over the past 15 years, Wikipedian veterans and administrators have made specific decisions to support administrative and editorial workflows with automation in particular ways and not others. I use these cases of Wikipedia's bot-supported bureaucracy to discuss several issues in the fields of critical algorithms studies, critical data studies, and fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning -- most principally arguing that scholarship and practice must go beyond trying to "open up the black box" of such systems and also examine sociocultural processes like newcomer socialization.Comment: 14 pages, typo fixed in v

Spartan Daily, May 7, 2014

Volume 142, Issue 39https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1498/thumbnail.jp

Making sense of the German Wikipedia community

This article presents the findings from a qualitative study of the German Wikipedia community, focusing on how people engaged with Wikipedia make sense of norms, collaborative practices and means of regulation within the community. The study highlights the strong focus on the quality of the end-product (the encyclopedia) in the German community, stressing that article quality is seen as more important than the wiki-process as such. As the community has grown, an increasing number of rules and mechanisms have been deployed to resolve various issues and conflicts, however the interviewees do not perceive Wikipedia as being bureaucratic, but rather describe it as a “rule-governed anarchy”. The findings suggest that people contribute for a variety of reasons, yet point to reactions from and interactions with fellow Wikipedians as one of the strongest motivational drivers for participation

Spartan Daily, May 7, 2014

Volume 142, Issue 39https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1498/thumbnail.jp

Once You Step Over the First Line, You Become Sensitized to the Next: Towards a Gateway Theory of Online Participation

This article proposes a gateway theory as a promising alternative to the traditional antecedents-based view of online participation. The traditional view contends that people plan their online participation based on some rational motivations, leading to a foreseeable route. We arrived at our proposition through two entrance stories. These stories offer rich descriptions of formative experiences and consequent participation progression. Our proposition of the gateway theory consists of two parts: First, participation occurs with uncertainty, involving trial and error, unknown risks and rewards, and the availability of technology-facilitated services. Second, participation consists of sequences of activities, in which each step sensitizes the person to opportunities previously not acknowledged. Consistent with the metaphor of the gateway, the first encounter may often be the most critical step. We argue that the gateway theory offers major opportunities for future research, particularly in conceptualizing the early stages of an individual’s path of online participation

The Wikipedia imaginaire: a new media history beyond Wikipedia.org (2001–2022)

This paper presents a media biography of Wikipedia’s data that focuses on the interpretative flexibility of Wikipedia and digital knowledge between the years 2001 and 2022. To do so, I not only follow a strand of media historians who argue that the imagination is an important component for understanding how media change, but I also argue that Wikipedia’s data has been incorporated, re-imagined, and repurposed by sociotechnical projects in ways that have often been side-lined despite acting as the boundary lines of what is considered digital knowledge. It combines Patrice Flichy’s longitudinal theory of technical development as an imaginaire, Frederik Lesage and Simone Natale’s historical approach of biographies of media with an analysis of the interpretative flexibility of new media. Through an eclectic corpus of project websites, new articles, press releases, and blogs, I demonstrate the unexpected ways the online encyclopedia has permeated throughout digital culture over the past twenty years through projects like the Citizendium, Everipedia, Google Search and AI software. As a result of this analysis, I explain how this array of meanings and materials constitutes the Wikipedia imaginaire: a collective activity of sociotechnical development that is fundamental to understanding the ideological and utopian meaning of knowledge with digital culture

Wikipedia Conflict Representation in Articles of War: A critical discourse analysis of current, on-going, socio-political Wikipedia articles about war

With the help of a discourse-historical approach, a textual corpus composed of the talk pages of three controversial, socio-political Wikipedia articles about ongoing wars was analyzed in order to shed light on the way in which conflict is represented through the editing and discussion process. Additionally, a rational discourse was employed in order to unravel communication distortions within the editing process in an attempt to improve communication and consensus-seeking. Finally, semi-structured interviews of participating contributors within studied articles were used in order to better understand Wikipedian experience in a controversial collaboration scenario. Results unveiled a set of discursive practices in which Wikipedians participate, as well as the creation of a Wikipedian argumentation topoi framework useful for further Wikipedia-specific discourse analysis involving the content change-retain negotiation process