Talk Pages Research Articles

Jürgen Habermas revisited via Tim Cook's Wikipedia biography: A hermeneutic approach to critical Information Systems research

Critical Information Systems (IS) research is sometimes appreciated for the shades of gray it adds to sunny portraits of technology's emancipatory potential. In this article, we revisit a theory about Wikipedia’s putative freedom from the authority of corporate media's editors and authors. We present the curious example of Tim Cook's Wikipedia biography and its history of crowd-sourced editorial decisions, published on Wikipedia's talk pages. We use a hermeneutic method to subject the theory about Wikipedia's “rational discourse” and “emancipatory potential” to a soft, empirical test. When we examined Cook's Wikipedia biography and its editorial decisions, what we found pertained to authoritative discourse – the opposite of “rational discourse” – as well as Jürgen Habermas's concept of dramaturgical action. Our discussion aims to change how critical scholars think about IS's Habermasian theories and emancipatory technology. Our contribution – a critical intervention – is a clear alternative to mainstream IS research's moral prescriptions and mechanistic causes.

Wikipedia’s Indian problem: settler colonial erasure of native American knowledge and history on the world’s largest encyclopedia

ABSTRACT This article details settler colonial erasure of Native American and Indigenous histories, knowledges, and philosophies on Wikipedia. I show that long-time Wikipedia editors follow the settler colonial logic of elimination to omit Native histories from Wikipedia’s American history pages; block Native and allied editors from adding scholarship that centers Native experience; and ban Native and allied editors from the website so that settlers can lay claim to digital space. To do so, I concentrate on Wikipedia’s United States and American history pages, and I detail editor discussions regarding Native histories on Wikipedia’s talk pages, noticeboards, and off-Wikipedia message boards where editors congregate. I supplement this information with interviews of Wikipedia editors engaged in editing these topics. I argue that digital erasure on Wikipedia is done in the service of claiming digital space, much like settler erasure in physical space is done to claim land. I ultimately provide suggestions for the Wikimedia foundation to combat settler colonial erasure on Wikipedia. This study contributes to recent work in the digital humanities that clarifies historical manipulation for public consumption by Wikipedia editors, and it provides key insights into the ways that settler colonialism manifests in digital space.

The role of English Wikipedia in mediating East Asian historical disputes: the case of Balhae

ABSTRACT With the expansion of the Internet in the early twenty-first century, public historical disputes between South Korea and China have become more pronounced. While existing research has focused on domestic Korean or Chinese digital spaces, the convergence or clash of these national narratives on global platforms remains underexplored. Our research bridges this gap by investigating the role of online platforms in shaping public historical debates. We compare the portrayals of Balhae, an ancient kingdom with contested contexts between the two nations. By comparing Chinese, Korean, and English Wikipedia entries on Balhae, we identify differences in narrative construction and framing. Employing Habermas’s typology of human action, we scrutinize related talk pages on English Wikipedia to examine the strategic actions multinational contributors employ to shape historical representation. This exploration reveals the dual role of online platforms in both amplifying and mediating historical disputes. While Wikipedia’s policies promote rational discourse, our findings indicate that contributors often vacillate between strategic and communicative actions. Nonetheless, the resulting article approximates Habermasian ideals of communicative rationality. This interaction accentuates the challenges and potential of fostering rational online discourse, the complexities of digital collaboration, and the quest for neutrality in open, decentralized platforms.

Allostructions and stancetaking: a corpus study of the German discourse management constructionsWo/wenn wir gerade/schon dabei sind

AbstractThe paper reconciles the sociolinguistic concept of stance and stancetaking and Construction Grammar (CxG); it shows that overlapping allostructions may differ in terms of the stances they convey. Drawing on a corpus study of Wikipedia Talk pages, the paper presents a case study of German discourse management markers such aswo wir gerade dabei sind‘speaking of which’ orwenn wir schon dabei sind‘while we’re at it’. By statistically comparing the observed frequencies of the filler items with the expected ones (using Hierarchical Configural Frequency Analysis and Distinctive Collexeme Analysis), I will argue that there are two different collocational types, namelywo wir/ich gerade beiNPsind/bin‘as we are/I am just at NP’ andwenn wir/du schon beiNPsind/bist‘as we/you are already at NP’. Both serve as discourse management markers, topic orientation markers in particular, whose purpose it is to shift the topic. They involve the same fixed pattern, combining the same categorical slots. However, they diverge in collocational preferences. I will argue that these collocational preferences are indicative of the stances the allostructions conventionally convey: While the allostructionwo wir/ich geradePPsind/binseems to be neutral in terms of stance (face-less stance),wenn wir/du schonPPsind/bistis often used to express negative evaluation of a previous utterance made by an interlocutor, thus marking disalignment. The expression of disalignment seems to be related to the construction’s propensity to reference utterances made by an interlocutor.

Toxic comments are associated with reduced activity of volunteer editors on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is one of the most successful collaborative projects in history. It is the largest encyclopedia ever created, with millions of users worldwide relying on it as the first source of information as well as for fact-checking and in-depth research. As Wikipedia relies solely on the efforts of its volunteer editors, its success might be particularly affected by toxic speech. In this paper, we analyze all 57 million comments made on user talk pages of 8.5 million editors across the six most active language editions of Wikipedia to study the potential impact of toxicity on editors' behavior. We find that toxic comments are consistently associated with reduced activity of editors, equivalent to 0.5-2 active days per user in the short term. This translates to multiple human-years of lost productivity, considering the number of active contributors to Wikipedia. The effects of toxic comments are potentially even greater in the long term, as they are associated with a significantly increased risk of editors leaving the project altogether. Using an agent-based model, we demonstrate that toxicity attacks on Wikipedia have the potential to impede the progress of the entire project. Our results underscore the importance of mitigating toxic speech on collaborative platforms such as Wikipedia to ensure their continued success.

Grappling with polarization on Wikipedia: the case of the biography of Ferdinand E. Marcos

PurposeIn this study, the authors look at the case of Ferdinand Marcos, President of the Philippines between 1965 and 1986. Documenting the life and career of Marcos on Wikipedia provides an excellent example of the pitfalls confronting those seeking to address disinformation without first reflecting deeply on the reasons why people subscribe to views deemed outlandish by the intellectual or cultural mainstream.Design/methodology/approachThe authors sampled the version of the Marcos article on Wikipedia as it existed after the first edit of each year since its inception (2002). This resulted in 22 texts for analysis. Content and thematic analyses were conducted on these texts as well as on the entire body of talk page comments for the article.FindingsThe authors' work suggests that the basic elements of responsible encyclopedic writing have prevailed in the case of Wikipedia's biography of Marcos. However, this is not an unalloyed victory, as issues of polarization remain unaddressed.Originality/valueUnderlying revisionist or distorted claims about Ferdinand Marcos (and other controversial topics) lie very real grievances that give these claims traction for many people. Hence, it is not enough to “just present the facts” to readers. Rather, the authors argue that what is needed is a synthesis of positions that would allow for common ground to be found between them. This could be done in the case of Wikipedia by cultivating editors who are capable and willing to engage with the subject literature in a deeper and richer fashion.

An analysis of discussions in collaborative knowledge engineering through the lens of Wikidata

We study discussions in Wikidata, the world’s largest open-source collaborative knowledge graph (KG). This is important because it helps KG community managers understand how discussions are used and inform the design of collaborative practices and support tools. We follow a mixed-methods approach with descriptive statistics, thematic analysis, and statistical tests to investigate how much discussions in Wikidata are used, what they are used for, and how they support knowledge engineering (KE) activities. The study covers three core sources of discussion, the talk pages that accompany Wikidata items and properties, and a general-purpose communication page. Our findings show low use of discussion capabilities and a power-law distribution similar to other KE projects such as Schema.org. When discussions are used, they are mostly about KE activities, including activities that span across the entire KE lifecycle from conceptualisation and implementation to maintenance and taxonomy building. We hope that the findings will help Wikidata devise improved practices and capabilities to encourage the use of discussions as a tool to collaborate, improve editor engagement, and engineer better KGs.

Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust

ABSTRACT This essay uncovers the systematic, intentional distortion of Holocaust history on the English-language Wikipedia, the world’s largest encyclopedia. In the last decade, a group of committed Wikipedia editors have been promoting a skewed version of history on Wikipedia, one touted by right-wing Polish nationalists, which whitewashes the role of Polish society in the Holocaust and bolsters stereotypes about Jews. Due to this group’s zealous handiwork, Wikipedia’s articles on the Holocaust in Poland minimize Polish antisemitism, exaggerate the Poles’ role in saving Jews, insinuate that most Jews supported Communism and conspired with Communists to betray Poles (Żydokomuna or Judeo–Bolshevism), blame Jews for their own persecution, and inflate Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. To explain how distortionist editors have succeeded in imposing this narrative, despite the efforts of opposing editors to correct it, we employ an innovative methodology. We examine 25 public-facing Wikipedia articles and nearly 300 of Wikipedia’s back pages, including talk pages, noticeboards, and arbitration cases. We complement these with interviews of editors in the field and statistical data gleaned through Wikipedia’s tool suites. This essay contributes to the study of Holocaust memory, revealing the digital mechanisms by which ideological zeal, prejudice, and bias trump reason and historical accuracy. More broadly, we break new ground in the field of the digital humanities, modelling an in-depth examination of how Wikipedia editors negotiate and manufacture information for the rest of the world to consume.

Proactive Moderation of Online Discussions: Existing Practices and the Potential for Algorithmic Support

To address the widespread problem of uncivil behavior, many online discussion platforms employ human moderators to take action against objectionable content, such as removing it or placing sanctions on its authors. Thisreactive paradigm of taking action against already-posted antisocial content is currently the most common form of moderation, and has accordingly underpinned many recent efforts at introducing automation into the moderation process. Comparatively less work has been done to understand other moderation paradigms---such as proactively discouraging the emergence of antisocial behavior rather than reacting to it---and the role algorithmic support can play in these paradigms. In this work, we investigate such a proactive framework for moderation in a case study of a collaborative setting: Wikipedia Talk Pages. We employ a mixed methods approach, combining qualitative and design components for a holistic analysis. Through interviews with moderators, we find that despite a lack of technical and social support, moderators already engage in a number of proactive moderation behaviors, such as preemptively intervening in conversations to keep them on track. Further, we explore how automation could assist with this existing proactive moderation workflow by building a prototype tool, presenting it to moderators, and examining how the assistance it provides might fit into their workflow. The resulting feedback uncovers both strengths and drawbacks of the prototype tool and suggests concrete steps towards further developing such assisting technology so it can most effectively support moderators in their existing proactive moderation workflow.

Asian American Female Composers and Digital Memory

Asian American Female Composers and Digital Memory

Portal Indigenous languages on Wikimedia

Video-presentation about the portal “Indigenous languages on Wikimedia”- Wayuu community.The Wayuu or Guajiro language is spoken by about 400,000 indigenous people in the Guajira Peninsula between Colombia and Venezuela, and is the most widely spoken indigenous language in both countries. But this does not place the language in a privileged position; on the contrary, it is among the region's endangered indigenous languages, with less and less Guajiro children learning to speak, let alone write the language. There is currently no Wikipedia in Wayuunaiki language, so speakers have to access information through Wikipedia in other languages. Although there is no Wikipedia in Wayuunaiki, there is an "incubator" of Wikipedia and Wiktionary.The "Indigenous Languages on Wikipedia" portal aims to be a place to collaborate and add knowledge of the Wayúu culture to the Wikimedia projects, as well as a space for learning about the language, its culture, traditions, and history. The portal has 3 sections, (1) to learn the Wayuunaiki language, (2) to collaborate in Wikimedia projects, and (3) talk page. Knowing how difficult it is to collaborate on Wikimedia platforms, especially for projects in the incubator, we plan to use the portal as a bridge to reduce the learning curve and centralize efforts to create, modify and improve information in and for speakers of the language. Finally, we seek to promote a friendly online space dedicated to a safe and constructive community exchange in order to strengthen the confidence of the Wayuu community in the Wikimedia networks.

Wikipedia = Heterotopia

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia using Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) concept of heterotopia. In Foucault’s writings, heterotopias are both similar to and distinct from the conditions that give rise to them. The paper undertakes a case study of one entry on Wikipedia (the entry for the “Episteme”) focusing primarily on the main entry and the talk page. The methodology is content analysis with a directed approach: data were gathered in November–December 2020. The paper argues Wikipedia can usefully be analysed as a heterotopia because it exposes the contentious conditions of knowledge production, which is not standard practice for an encyclopaedia. The article adds to our understanding by applying the Foucauldian concept of heterotopia to a specific Wikipedia entry, highlighting how knowledge is produced out of dispute and subjective discourses.

Wikipedian Self-Governance in Action: Motivating the Policy Lens

While previous studies have used the Wikipedia dataset to provide an understanding of its growth, there have been few attempts to quantitatively analyze the establishment and evolution of the rich social practices that support this editing community. One such social practice is the enactment and creation of Wikipedian policies. We focus on the enactment of policies in discussions on the talk pages that accompany each article. These policy citations are a valuable micro-to-macro connection between everyday action, communal norms and the governance structure of Wikipedia. We find that policies are widely used by registered users and administrators, that their use is converging and stabilizing in and across these groups, and that their use illustrates the growing importance of certain classes of work, in particular source attribution. We also find that participation in Wikipedia's governance structure is inclusionary in practice.

Wiki Editors' Acceptance of Additional Guidance on Talk Pages

One purpose of Wikis like Wikipedia is to collaboratively generate content. During the creation processes controversies between multiple authors might emerge that are further discussed on a Wiki article's so-called talk page. Research has shown that controversies grounded on opposing points of view and contradictory evidence can be fruitful to trigger individual elaboration processes. But it has also been shown that many Wikis are not necessarily suited to identify relevant discussion contents and thus need additional support to guide users. In an experimental study (N = 181) we implemented on a Wiki talk page (1) visual controversy status highlights as implicit guidance and (2) a collaboration script directing users towards discussions as explicit guidance. We analyzed their user adoption and influence on Wiki activities. Our results show that both experimental additions affect user behaviors and that in particular the visual controversy status highlights are positively adopted by users.

When the Wikipedians Talk: Network and Tree Structure of Wikipedia Discussion Pages

Talk pages play a fundamental role in Wikipedia as the place for discussion and communication. In this work we use the comments on these pages to extract and study three networks, corresponding to different kinds of interactions. We find evidence of a specific assortativity profile which differentiates article discussions from personal conversations. An analysis of the tree structure of the article talk pages allows to capture patterns of interaction, and reveals structural differences among the discussions about articles from different semantic areas.

Let's Talk about Talks: Supporting Knowledge Exchange Processes on Wiki Discussion Pages

Complex knowledge exchange processes in collaborative knowledge building settings within Wikis can be either supported by providing guidance in form of cognitive group awareness information or by explicitly guiding learners with the help of collaboration scripts. Potentials of analysing and supporting discussants' knowledge building processes focussed on the level of talk pages have still been rarely researched. Our research project comprises a series of three experimental studies and one qualitative study to determine which kind of support is most beneficial for varying types of learners working with Wikis. For this research different fields of computer-supported collaborative learning are integrated and both quantitative and qualitative methods are applied to provide comprehensive analyses in order to provide opportunities for other related research. Presenting and discussing aspects of our research and first results could be beneficial for future research. Our findings suggest that Wiki talk page users can benefit from additional structuring aids.

A Platform for Visually Exploring the Development of Wikipedia Articles

When looking for information on Wikipedia, Internet users generally just read the latest version of an article. However, in its back-end there is much more: associated to each article are the edit history and talk pages, which together entail its full evolution. These spaces can typically reach thousands of contributions, and it is not trivial to make sense of them by manual inspection. This issue also affects Wikipedians, especially the less experienced ones, and constitutes a barrier for new editor engagement and retention. To address these limitations, Contropedia offers its users unprecedented access to the development of an article, using wiki links as focal points.

A Lightly Supervised Approach to Role Identification in Wikipedia Talk Page Discussions

In this paper we describe an application of a lightly supervised Role Identification Model (RIM) to the analysis of coordination in Wikipedia talk page discussions. Our goal is to understand the substance of important coordination roles that predict quality of the Wikipedia pages where the discussions take place. Using the model as a lens, we present an analysis of four important coordination roles identified using the model, including Workers, Critiquers, Encouragers, and Managers.

Users roles identification on online crowdsourced Q&A platforms and encyclopedias: a survey

Online informal learning and knowledge-sharing platforms, such as Stack Exchange, Reddit, and Wikipedia have been a great source of learning. Millions of people access these websites to ask questions, answer the questions, view answers, or check facts. However, one interesting question that has always attracted the researchers is if all the users share equally on these portals, and if not then how the contribution varies across users, and how it is distributed? Do different users focus on different kinds of activities and play specific roles? In this work, we present a survey of users’ social roles that have been identified on online discussion and Q&A platforms including Usenet newsgroups, Reddit, Stack Exchange, and MOOC forums, as well as on crowdsourced encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia, and Baidu Baike, where users interact with each other through talk pages. We discuss the state of the art on capturing the variety of users roles through different methods including the construction of user network, analysis of content posted by users, temporal analysis of user activity, posting frequency, and so on. We also discuss the available datasets and APIs to collect the data from these platforms for further research. The survey is concluded with open research questions.

Wikipedia Beyond the English Language Edition

Do models of collaboration among contributors of Wikipedia generalize beyond the larger, western editions of the encyclopedia? In this study, we expanded upon the known collaborative mechanisms on the English Wikipedia and demonstrated that the collaboration model is best captured through the interplay of these mechanisms. We annotated talk page conversations for types of power plays or vies for control over edits that are made to articles, to understand how policy and power play mechanisms in editors' discussions account for behavior in English (EN), Farsi (FA), and Chinese (ZH) language editions of Wikipedia. Our findings show that the same power plays used in EN exist in both FA and ZH but the frequency of their usage differs across the editions. These variations suggest that editors in different language communities value contrasting types of policies to compete for power while discussing and editing articles. Our study contributes to a deeper understanding of how collaboration models developed from a western perspective translate to non-western languages.