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User:Halfak (WMF)/Wiki system overview

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Article editing dynamics edit

 
A history flow visualization[1] of en:Treaty of Trianon is presented.

Some studies have explored the dynamics of editing and how certain patterns of contribution are more likely to lead to high quality articles than others. Beyond the obvious predictors (# of contributors and content contributed) diversity seems to be important -- both in terms of amount of contribution to the article per editor and in the amount of experience each editor brings to the article. To state it simply, it is important that some editors are highly experienced while others are more green. It's important that few editors contribute a lot to an article while most others contribute only a little.


Notes
  • [1] developed a visualization technique to show the development of article content over time. This visualization makes certain types of editor behavior -- e.g. en:edit warring -- highly visible.
  • [2] showed that talk pages serve a key role in negotiating article content.
  • [3] found that articles with a small group of highly active editors and a large group of less active editors were more likely to increase in quality than articles whose editors contributed more evenly. They argued that this is due to the lower coordination cost when few people are primarily engaged in the construction of an article.
  • [4] challenged the conclusions of [3] by showing a strong correlation between diversity of experience (global inequality) between editors who are active and positive changes in article quality.
  • [5] todo

Process and norms edit

 
Growth of norms in enwiki. The growth (in bytes) of policies guidelines and essays is plotted over time for the English Wikipedia.

In order to coordinate asynchronously and in the absence of centralized organizational structures, Wikipedians have developed formalized processes and norms. These processes represent a sort of social machinery whose movements result in desirable outcomes. The development and formalization of these norms has historically been distributed and by those most affected by them (this is highly desirable[6]).

To newcomers -- who couldn't have been around during the formation of processes and norms -- the rules are complex and often non-intuitive. This causes difficulty and often leads to frustration for good-faith newcomers. It also results in power disparities where experienced editors are more empowered by their "process literacy" to "win" disputes.


Notes
  • [7] discuss the "background knowledge" that is critical to operating within Wikipedia and describe several asymmetries that adversely affect the power of newcomers. They call for designers to make references to norms (traces) explicit to enable newcomers to gain "literacy" quickly.
  • [8] showed a trickle-down effect of policy citation (assumed usage/literacy) from admins --> experienced Wikipedians --> newcomers.
  • [9] describe the process of socialization (becoming Wikipedian) before the norms and process became unmanageable.
  • [10] describes how the distributed strategy of norm formation and formalization allows Wikipedians to govern at scale.
  • [11] describes how Wikipedia norm formation system has calcified against changes -- especially those by newcomers. It also shows how interest in developing norms has not waned -- and has instead been redirected towards essays -- informal and unenforceable meta norms.

Integration of technology and social practice edit

 
Counter vandalism unit logo. 
 
New page patrol DEFCON. 

The development of technologies to support Wikipedian process has been essential to reducing the workload of humans (so that they can focus on article editing), and in some cases, for making the work tractable at scale. Robots are the most commonly cited example of bespoke code, but the JavaScript gadget system and even clever re-applications of MediaWiki's functionality have also become tightly woven within the social practice of Wikipedia editing. The technologies developed by Wikipedians perpetuate the ideological view of their developers, and this has lead to power dynamics and organizational breakdowns when the technologies used by editors operating in one role allow them to overpower editors operating in another.

Notes
  • [12] discusses the origin, development and social roles that robots take in Wikipedia.
  • [13] discusses the "distributed cognition" system that formed through the integration of counter-vandalism tools and social practices around quality control.
  • [11] implicates the efficiency of counter-vandalism and the lacking of social affordances of automated tools in a sudden switch in the way that newcomers are treated in Wikipedia.
  • [14] argues that ideological foundations can be propagated by the developers of technologies and makes a case for how this happened in Wikipedia. Halfaker also argues that such ideologies can be challenged and the breakdowns highlighted through the development of technologies that propagate competing ideologies.

TODO: much more here

References edit

  1. ↑ a b Viégas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., & Dave, K. (2004, April). Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 575-582). ACM.
  2. ↑ Viegas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J., & Van Ham, F. (2007, January). Talk before you type: Coordination in Wikipedia. In System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on (pp. 78-78). IEEE.
  3. ↑ a b Kittur, A., Chi, E., Pendleton, B. A., Suh, B., & Mytkowicz, T. (2007). Power of the few vs. wisdom of the crowd: Wikipedia and the rise of the bourgeoisie. World wide web, 1(2), 19.
  4. ↑ Arazy, O., & Nov, O. (2010, February). Determinants of wikipedia quality: the roles of global and local contribution inequality. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 233-236). ACM.
  5. ↑ Arazy, O., Nov, O., Patterson, R., & Yeo, L. (2011). Information quality in Wikipedia: The effects of group composition and task conflict. Journal of Management Information Systems, 27(4), 71-98.
  6. ↑ Ostrom, E., Walker, J., & Gardner, R. (1992). Covenants with and without a Sword: Self-governance Is Possible. American Political Science Review, 86(02), 404-417.
  7. ↑ Ford, H., & Geiger, R. S. (2012, August). Writing up rather than writing down: Becoming wikipedia literate. In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (p. 16). ACM.
  8. ↑ Beschastnikh, I., Kriplean, T., & McDonald, D. W. (2008, March). Wikipedian Self-Governance in Action: Motivating the Policy Lens. In ICWSM.
  9. ↑ Bryant, S. L., Forte, A., & Bruckman, A. (2005, November). Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work (pp. 1-10). ACM.
  10. ↑ Forte, A., & Bruckman, A. (2008, January). Scaling consensus: Increasing decentralization in Wikipedia governance. In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Proceedings of the 41st Annual (pp. 157-157). IEEE.
  11. ↑ a b Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., & Riedl, J. (2012). The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. American Behavioral Scientist, 0002764212469365.
  12. ↑ Geiger, R. S. (2011). The lives of bots. Critical point of view: A Wikipedia reader. http://www.stuartgeiger.com/lives-of-bots-wikipedia-cpov.pdf
  13. ↑ Geiger, R. S., & Ribes, D. (2010, February). The work of sustaining order in wikipedia: the banning of a vandal. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (pp. 117-126). ACM.
  14. ↑ Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., & Terveen, L. G. (2014, April). Snuggle: designing for efficient socialization and ideological critique. In Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 311-320). ACM.
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