Many Destinations, Many Pathways: A Quantitative Analysis of Legitimate Peripheral Participation in Scratch

Although informal online learning communities have proliferated over the last two decades, a fundamental question remains: What are the users of these communities expected to learn? Guided by the work of Etienne Wenger on communities of practice, we identify three distinct types of learning goals common to online informal learning communities: the development of domain skills, the development of identity as a community member, and the development of community-specific values and practices. Given these goals, what is the best way to support learning? Drawing from previous research in social computing, we ask how different types of legitimate peripheral participation by newcomers-contribution to core tasks, engagement with practice proxies, social bonding, and feedback exchange-may be associated with these three learning goals. Using data from the Scratch online community, we conduct a quantitative analysis to explore these questions. Our study contributes both theoretical insights and empirical evidence on how different types of learning occur in informal online environments

Taboo and Collaborative Knowledge Production: Evidence from Wikipedia

By definition, people are reticent or even unwilling to talk about taboo subjects. Because subjects like sexuality, health, and violence are taboo in most cultures, important information on each of these subjects can be difficult to obtain. Are peer produced knowledge bases like Wikipedia a promising approach for providing people with information on taboo subjects? With its reliance on volunteers who might also be averse to taboo, can the peer production model produce high-quality information on taboo subjects? In this paper, we seek to understand the role of taboo in knowledge bases produced by volunteers. We do so by developing a novel computational approach to identify taboo subjects and by using this method to identify a set of articles on taboo subjects in English Wikipedia. We find that articles on taboo subjects are more popular than non-taboo articles and that they are frequently vandalized. Despite frequent vandalism attacks, we also find that taboo articles are higher quality than non-taboo articles. We hypothesize that stigmatizing societal attitudes will lead contributors to taboo subjects to seek to be less identifiable. Although our results are consistent with this proposal in several ways, we surprisingly find that contributors make themselves more identifiable in others

Designing for Critical Algorithmic Literacies

As pervasive data collection and powerful algorithms increasingly shape children's experience of the world and each other, their ability to interrogate computational algorithms has become crucially important. A growing body of work has attempted to articulate a set of "literacies" to describe the intellectual tools that children can use to understand, interrogate, and critique the algorithmic systems that shape their lives. Unfortunately, because many algorithms are invisible, only a small number of children develop the literacies required to critique these systems. How might designers support the development of critical algorithmic literacies? Based on our experience designing two data programming systems, we present four design principles that we argue can help children develop literacies that allow them to understand not only how algorithms work, but also to critique and question them

Are anonymity-seekers just like everybody else? An analysis of contributions to Wikipedia from Tor

User-generated content sites routinely block contributions from users of privacy-enhancing proxies like Tor because of a perception that proxies are a source of vandalism, spam, and abuse. Although these blocks might be effective, collateral damage in the form of unrealized valuable contributions from anonymity seekers is invisible. One of the largest and most important user-generated content sites, Wikipedia, has attempted to block contributions from Tor users since as early as 2005. We demonstrate that these blocks have been imperfect and that thousands of attempts to edit on Wikipedia through Tor have been successful. We draw upon several data sources and analytical techniques to measure and describe the history of Tor editing on Wikipedia over time and to compare contributions from Tor users to those from other groups of Wikipedia users. Our analysis suggests that although Tor users who slip through Wikipedia's ban contribute content that is more likely to be reverted and to revert others, their contributions are otherwise similar in quality to those from other unregistered participants and to the initial contributions of registered users.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy, May 202