Department of Communication Faculty Papers

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://digital.lib.washington.edu/handle/1773/11642

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The Risks, Benefits, and Consequences of Prepublication Moderation: Evidence from 17 Wikipedia Language Editions
(2022-11-11) Tran, Chau; Champion, Kaylea; Hill, Benjamin Mako; Greenstadt, Rachel
Many online communities rely on postpublication moderation where contributors-even those that are perceived as being risky-are allowed to publish material immediately and where moderation takes place after the fact. An alternative arrangement involves moderating content before publication. A range of communities have argued against prepublication moderation by suggesting that it makes contributing less enjoyable for new members and that it will distract established community members with extra moderation work. We present an empirical analysis of the effects of a prepublication moderation system called FlaggedRevs that was deployed by several Wikipedia language editions. We used panel data from 17 large Wikipedia editions to test a series of hypotheses related to the effect of the system on activity levels and contribution quality. We found that the system was very effective at keeping low-quality contributions from ever becoming visible. Although there is some evidence that the system discouraged participation among users without accounts, our analysis suggests that the system's effects on contribution volume and quality were moderate at most. Our findings imply that concerns regarding the major negative effects of prepublication moderation systems on contribution quality and project productivity may be overstated.
Life Histories of Taboo Knowledge Artifacts
(2024-11-08) Champion, Kaylea; Hill, Benjamin Mako
Communicating about some vital topics—such as sexuality and health—is treated as taboo and subjected to censorship. How can we construct knowledge about these topics? Wikipedia is home to numerous high-quality knowledge artifacts about taboo topics like sexual organs and human reproduction. How did these artifacts come into being? How is their existence sustained? This mixed-methods comparative project builds on previous work on taboo topics in Wikipedia and draws from qualitative and quantitative approaches. We follow a sequential complementary design, developing a narrative articulation of the life of taboo articles, comparing them to nontaboo articles, and examining some of their quantifiable traits. We find that taboo knowledge artifacts develop through multiple successful collaboration styles and, unsurprisingly, that taboo subjects are the sites of conflict. We identify and describe six themes in the development of taboo knowledge artifacts. These artifacts need resilient leadership and engaged organizations to thrive under conditions of limited identifiability and disjointed sensemaking, while contributors simultaneously engage in emergent governance and imagining public audiences. Our observations have important implications for supporting public knowledge work on controversial subjects such as taboos and more generally.
Challenges in Restructuring Community-Based Moderation
(2024-11-08) Tran, Chau; Take, Kejsi; Champion, Kaylea; Hill, Benjamin Mako; Greenstadt, Rachel
Content moderation practices and technologies need to change over time as requirements and community expectations shift. However, attempts to restructure the existing moderation practices can be difficult, especially for platforms that rely on their communities to moderate, because changes can transform the workflow and workload, participants' reward systems. By examining the extensive archival discussions around a prepublication moderation technology on Wikipedia named Flagged Revisions, complemented by seven semi-structured interviews, we identify various challenges in restructuring community-based moderation practices. Thus, we find that while a new system might sound good in theory and perform well in terms of quantitative metrics, it may conflict with existing social norms. Furthermore, our findings underscore how the relationship between platforms and self-governed communities can hinder the ability to assess the performance of any new system and introduce considerable costs related to maintaining, overhauling, or scrapping any piece of infrastructure.
Governance Capture in a Self-Governing Community: A Qualitative Comparison of the Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias
(2024-04-26) Kharazian, Zarine; Starbird, Kate; Mako Hill, Benjamin
What types of governance arrangements make some self-governed online groups more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns? We present a qualitative comparative analysis of the Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia editions to answer this question. We do so because between at least 2011 and 2020, the Croatian language version of Wikipedia was taken over by a small group of administrators who introduced far-right bias and outright disinformation. Dissenting editorial voices were reverted, banned, and blocked. Although Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias share many linguistic and cultural features, and faced similar threats, they seem to have largely avoided this fate. Based on a grounded theory analysis of interviews with members of these communities and others in cross-functional platform-level roles, we propose that the convergence of three features---high perceived value as a target, limited early bureaucratic openness, and a preference for personalistic, informal forms of organization over formal ones—produced a window of opportunity for governance capture on Croatian Wikipedia. Our findings illustrate that online community governing infrastructures can play a crucial role in systematic disinformation campaigns and other influence operations.
How Interest-Driven Content Creation Shapes Opportunities for Informal Learning in Scratch: A Case Study on Novices’ Use of Data Structures
(2022-03-22) Cheng, Ruijia; Dasgupta, Sayamindu; Mako Hill, Benjamin
Through a mixed-method analysis of data from Scratch, we examine how novices learn to program with simple data structures by using community-produced learning resources. First, we present a qualitative study that describes how community-produced learning resources create archetypes that shape exploration and may disadvantage some with less common interests. In a second quantitative study, we find broad support for this dynamic in several hypothesis tests. Our findings identify a social feedback loop that we argue could limit sources of inspiration, pose barriers to broadening participation, and confine learners' understanding of general concepts. We conclude by suggesting several approaches that may mitigate these dynamics.
Taboo and Collaborative Knowledge Production: Evidence from Wikipedia
(2023-08-11) Champion, Kaylea; Mako Hill, Benjamin
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.
No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities
(2022-02-10) TeBlunthuis, Nathan; Kiene, Charles; Brown, Isabella; Levi, Laura (Alia); McGinnis, Nicole; Mako Hill, Benjamin
Large-scale quantitative analyses have shown that individuals frequently talk to each other about similar things in different online spaces. Why do these overlapping communities exist? We provide an answer grounded in the analysis of 20 interviews with active participants in clusters of highly related subreddits. Within a broad topical area, there are a diversity of benefits an online community can confer. These include (a) specific information and discussion, (b) socialization with similar others, and (c) attention from the largest possible audience. A single community cannot meet all three needs. Our findings suggest that topical areas within an online community platform tend to become populated by groups of specialized communities with diverse sizes, topical boundaries, and rules. Compared with any single community, such systems of overlapping communities are able to provide a greater range of benefits.
From hanging out to figuring it out: Socializing online as a pathway to computational thinking
(2020-04-19) Shorey, Samantha; Hill, Benjamin Mako; Woolley, Samuel C.
Although socializing is a powerful driver of youth engagement online, platforms struggle to leverage engagement to promote learning. We seek to understand this dynamic using a multi-stage analysis of over 14,000 comments on Scratch, an online platform designed to support learning about programming. First, we inductively develop the concept of “participatory debugging”—a practice through which users learn through collaborative technical troubleshooting. Second, we use a content analysis to establish how common the practice is on Scratch. Third, we conduct a qualitative analysis of user activity over time and identify three factors that serve as social antecedents of participatory debugging: (1) sustained community, (2) identifiable problems, and (3) what we call “topic porousness” to describe conversations that are able to span multiple topics. We integrate these findings in a theoretical framework that highlights a productive tension between the desire to promote learning and the interest-driven sub-communities that drive user engagement in many new media environments.
The Most Important Laboratory for Social Scientific and Computing Research in History
(2019-10-14) Mako Hill, Benjamin; Shaw, Aaron D.
Wikipedia's founders could not have dreamed they were creating the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history but that is exactly what happened. Hill and Shaw take account of Wikipedia's enormous effect on academic scholarship.
The Most Important Laboratory for Social Scientific and Computing Research in History
(2020) Mako Hill, Benjamin; Shaw, Aaron D.
Wikipedia’s founders could not have dreamed they were creating the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history but that is exactly what happened. Hill and Shaw take account of Wikipedia's enormous effect on academic scholarship.
A Forensic Qualitative Analysis of Contributions to Wikipedia from Anonymity Seeking Users
(2019-09-16) Champion, Kaylea; McDonald, Nora; Bankes, Stephanie; Zhang, joseph; Greenstadt, Rachel; Forte, Andrea; Mako Hill, Benjamin
By choice or by necessity, some contributors to commons-based peer production sites use privacy-protecting services to remain anonymous. As anonymity seekers, users of the Tor network have been cast both as ill-intentioned vandals and as vulnerable populations concerned with their privacy. In this study, we use a dataset drawn from a corpus of Tor edits to Wikipedia to uncover the character of Tor users' contributions. We build in-depth narrative descriptions of Tor users' actions and conduct a thematic analysis that places their editing activity into seven broad groups. We find that although their use of a privacy-protecting service marks them as unusual within Wikipedia, the character of many Tor users' contributions is in line with the expectations and norms of Wikipedia. However, our themes point to several important places where lack of trust promotes disorder, and to contributions where risks to contributors, service providers, and communities are unaligned.
The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From Peer Production
(2021-11-20) Mako Hill, Benjamin; Shaw, Aaron D.
Online communities, like Wikipedia, produce valuable public information goods. Whereas some of these communities require would-be contributors to create accounts, many do not. Does this requirement catalyze cooperation or inhibit participation? Prior research provides divergent predictions but little causal evidence. We conduct an empirical test using longitudinal data from 136 natural experiments where would-be contributors to wikis were suddenly required to log in to contribute. Requiring accounts leads to a small increase in account creation, but reduces both high- and low-quality contributions from registered and unregistered participants. Although the change deters a large portion of low-quality participation, the vast majority of deterred contributions are of higher quality. We conclude that requiring accounts introduces an undertheorized tradeoff for public goods production in interactive communication systems.
Effects of Algorithmic Flagging on Fairness: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Wikipedia
(2021-04-22) TeBlunthuis, Nathan; Hill, Benjamin Mako; Halfaker, Aaron
Online community moderators often rely on social signals such as whether or not a user has an account or a profile page as clues that users may cause problems. Reliance on these clues can lead to "overprofiling'' bias when moderators focus on these signals but overlook the misbehavior of others. We propose that algorithmic flagging systems deployed to improve the efficiency of moderation work can also make moderation actions more fair to these users by reducing reliance on social signals and making norm violations by everyone else more visible. We analyze moderator behavior in Wikipedia as mediated by RCFilters, a system which displays social signals and algorithmic flags, and estimate the causal effect of being flagged on moderator actions. We show that algorithmically flagged edits are reverted more often, especially those by established editors with positive social signals, and that flagging decreases the likelihood that moderation actions will be undone. Our results suggest that algorithmic flagging systems can lead to increased fairness in some contexts but that the relationship is complex and contingent.
Consider the Redirect: A Missing Dimension of Wikipedia Research
(2015-06) Hill, Benjamin Mako; Shaw, Aaron
A feature of most wikis, “redirects” are special pages that silently transport visitors to other pages. In Wikipedia, the only indication that one has visited a redirect is that the page title and the URL in the browser are different and a very small hyperlinked message appears near the article title (see Figure 1). Clicking on this link will take the user to the redirect page itself. Redirects in Wikipedia are normal pages that begin with “#redirect [[Target]]” where “Target” is the page to which visitors will be redirected. Although redirect pages can contain extensive text, their content is almost never viewed and very rarely edited. Despite their near-invisibility, redirects play an important role in shaping activity in Wikipedia. Redirects are a majority of all article pages in English Wikipedia and are viewed millions of times each month. They represent a central form of the encyclopedia’s “hidden order” [7] and contribute to wikis’ usability and user experience. That said, redirects have attracted very little attention from researchers studying Wikipedia and are, with rare exceptions (e.g., [3, 8]) rarely discussed explicitly in the analysis of Wikipedia data. In this note, we make several contributions: First, we introduce a longitudinal database that makes it easier to study redirects in English Wikipedia over time and use this database to characterize the enormous volume of activity around redirects. Then, we use the database to illustrate the importance of considering redirects in two relationships of central interest to many researchers: (1) the distribution of edits over articles and (2) the relationship between views and edits. We conclude with guidance for how researchers should account for redirects in future work.
Materiality: Challenges and Opportunities for Communication Theory
(University of Washington Department of Communication, 2014-05) Neff, Gina; Fiore-Silfvast, Brittany; Dossick, Carrie Sturts
Increasingly, communication researchers are issuing calls for attention to the role materiality plays in communication processes (e.g., Boczkowski, 2004; Boczkowski & Lievrouw, 2008; Leonardi & Barley, 2008; Leonardi, Nardi, & Kallinikos, 2013; Lievrouw, 2013). Resulting in part from the challenges of studying new communication and information technologies, this new focus on materiality offers opportunities for communication researchers to theorize beyond communication through, with, and, in some cases, without a medium to think about the material structures of mediation itself. In this chapter we propose a model for thinking through the communicative roles and functions of the materiality of everyday objects, by using one type of objects, documents, as an extended theoretical example of the importance of materiality for communication.
Conflicts of interest in translational research
(2004) Disis, Mary L.; Parks, Malcolm R.
Translational research requires a team approach to scientific inquiry and product development. Translational research teams consist of basic and clinical scientists who can be members of both academic and industrial communities. The conception, pre-clinical testing, and clinical evaluation of a diagnostic or therapeutic approach demands an intense interaction between investigators with diverse backgrounds. As the barriers between industry and academia are removed, issues of potential conflict of interest become more complex. Translational researchers must become aware of the situations which constitute conflict of interest and understand how such conflicts can impact their research programs. Finally, the translational research community must participate in the dialogue ongoing in the public and private sectors and help shape the rules that will govern conflicts that arise during the evolution of their research programs.
Future Directions for Public Deliberation
(2005) Levine, Peter; Fung, Archon; Gastil, John W.
How Balanced Discussion Shapes Knowledge, Public Perceptions, and Attitudes: A Case Study of Deliberation on the Los Alamos National Laboratory
(2006) Gastil, John W.
Prior research has demonstrated the potential impact of carefully orchestrated public forums, such as National Issues Forums and deliberative polls. Many public discussions, however, lack the careful design and focused purposes of such events, and it remains unclear to what extent informal conversations and public meetings can produce the same knowledge gains and attitude changes. If public meetings and conversations are to have similar impacts, they may require important features of deliberation, such as the balanced presentation of alternative viewpoints. To explore the associations of perceived discussion balance with issue knowledge, attitude integration, and the misperception of public attitudes, this study used cross-sectional survey data regarding how New Mexicans view Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). The findings confirm the significance of perceived discussion balance for many—but not all—of the positive cognitive impacts of public discussions and conversations. Moreover, these findings show that deliberation is more scarce for some sub-publics than others, and the deliberative experience may be least common for those who need it most.
Public Deliberation as the Organizing Principle of Political Communication Research
(2008) Gastil, John W.; Black, Laura W.
During the past fifteen years, public deliberation has become an important focus of research, theory, and public practice. This has sometimes led to a variety of narrow conceptualizations that limit deliberation to particular forms of interaction, such as small group discussion, or to divergent conceptualizations deployed in different contexts, such as for media systems versus face-to-face discussions. To address this problem, we advance a flexible yet precise definition of deliberation that has the power to organize not only deliberation theory and research but also much of the larger body of work in political communication. As defined herein, deliberation includes both analytic and social processes and provides a unifying conceptual and critical framework for studying nearly the full range of political communication topics, including informal conversation, media and public opinion, elections, government institutional behavior, jury decision making, public meetings, and civic and community life. Using our flexible conceptualization, each of these research contexts amounts to a kind of deliberative critique and empirical analysis of public life.

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