Social Documents, Wikis

Social Documents, Wikis Week 5 (Oct. 2-7, 2008) Julita Vassileva Social Computing Class

Is Text Bound to Disappear? • Desolated libraries • Who reads newspapers or books these days? • Speech-based interface • Decreasing literacy levels / changing of language into SMS lingo

The Social Life of Documents Documents are not just carriers of information, they are “a powerful resource for constructing and negotiating social space” (Brown & Duguid, 1986) Through history (e.g. Ancient Persian, Egyptian):

Documents as Darts • A sort of paper transport carrying pre-formed ideas or information through space and time • Conduit metaphor emphasizes important aspects of communication technologies. • Important to look beyond this metaphor now when new communication technologies have evolved

Linked by Text • Sociologist Anselm Strauss explored the way new forms of document allowed new forms of community (“social worlds”) to come into existence. • Communities comprise people exchanging information in the form of documents in some medium. • Examples: • the Royal Society in England was formed by scholars sending letters to each other, which later evolved into scientific journals • “Samizdat”- political underground movements in former Socialist countries used cyclostyle to publish and disseminate dissident writings • “Zines” - beekeepers used typewriter, and fax to circulate newsletters and organize • new media make it easy for people with shared interests to form social worlds, but also easy to dissent and form splinter groups • Social worlds now are much more volatile with new document media. The key to forming a new group is starting a new publication to hold it together.

Political Linkage • Documents have played a political role in antiquity. • Key role in the formation of nations in the late 18th century • Constitutions, charters or rights, declaration of independence etc. – declaring shared values • Newspapers and media – projecting an image of a community among the diverse and scattered population, “imagined community” - awareness of others • Journals, novels, pamphlets, ballad sheets, poetry, TV– creating a cultural sense of common identity, interests • Web-documents stretch the geographical boundaries of imagined communities across the globe • Time-shifted Community versus Synchronicity in experience –share the moment with others – as audience in a theatre or in a football game, stand in line to see the opening of Harry Potter XXV.

Negotiating Meaning • Communities create meaning for themselves • A document is an “open category” defined by what we (as readers) decide to put in it. • However, not all members of a community have exactly the same interpretation; the documents in the community are grounds for fight, merely the pre-text for agreement. Documents provide a shared context for constructing the meaning, they are the beginning, not the end of the negotiation.

Means for Negotiating • Documents provide a shared context for constructing meaning • Something to discuss, argue about, change… • Comments as a form for negotiating meaning between a reader and a document • Writing on writing; commentaries in the margins, reviews, analyses, references, annotation • Digital documents provide an immediate social dimension to a document through hyperlinks and comments • Hard/impossible on a physical document.

Means for Negotiating • Comments in the physical margins • Comments in digital documents • To entire document (like review) • Contextualized comments in the text • Hyperlinks • Track-backs (on blogs) • Discussion forums (in e-magazines, Wikipedia) • Ratings

Engaging the community • “Economy of attention” – the swelling number of documents and the shrinking amount of time available • Central issue for the intended audience to recognize documents intended for them • Tech tools: Search engines, Recommenders

Docs as Boundary Objects • Comprehension and coordination • Within community, documents with highly condensed form of communication work well. • Documents that pass successfully between communities need to be able to engage at least 2 interpretive strategies: not to bore the members or the original community, and be clear for the members of the new community • Especially important in corporations, communication across different departments

Docs as Boundary Objects • Patrolling and Controlling • Patrolling community boundaries through unexplained generic conventions, jargon, abbreviations, allusions, encryption, access restrictions • Control is more subtle. Boundary documents are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites. They use different meaning in different social worlds, but a structure that is common enough to make them recognizable – “translation”, where the needs of one community is expressed into the terms of another . The process of translation is often an attempt to subordinate one group to the other’s interpretation (e.g. in corporations). Similar struggles within communities can lead either to domination or to separation of different fractions into new distinct communities.

Digital documents • “Performing documents” – music, video, collaborative spaces, shared documents, wikis • Minimizing the technological separation between producer and consumer • Still usually there is a social distinction between writer and reader (blogs, e-magazines, forums) • In others, the distinction is blurred (MOOs, Wiki) • Mutable versus Fixed • Still useful to maintain versions, time stamps to maintain a notion of fixed documents as points of ref.

Implications • Multimedia documents – created and uploaded in a second (no thinking process involved necessarily) • Growing emphasis on speed versus depth  Implications? • No time for editing, interpretation, negotiation, • Documents & Knowledge: from a “stock” to a “flow” • Fewer resources invested in creation • Communities mobilized as intellectual authority

Collaborative Documents: Wikipedia Based on: • Becoming Wikipedian… by Susan Bryant, Andrea Forte, Amy Bruckman • …Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance, by Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman

History • First wiki launched in 1995 by Ward Cunningham – public editable space • Wikipedia launched on 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger • 650,000 articles in English in July 2005 • 3 million articles in August 2009 • In July 2007, about 2,200 articles added daily; • as of August 2009, that average is 1,300. ?? • Guiding principle: the Neutral Point of View

Patterns of cooperation and conflict • Fernanda Viegas history flow visualization http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/

History flow: four patterns • Vandalism and Repair • Anonymity vs. named authorship • Negotiation • Content Stability Abortion Chocolate Microsoft

Design Supports Social Surveillance • The Wikipedia interface is designed to encourage surveillance of others’ contributions: • Watch lists – to find and repair vandalism • Discussion pages – space to reach consensus that is separate from the article space • Emphasis on the neutral point of view as a guiding rule for resolving conflicts.

Transformation of Subject From Novice to a Wikipedian • Novice users edit what they know, minor changes, triggered by searching for an article, see themselves as consumers • Experts (Wikipedians) the Wikipedia as a whole is more important than any single article; concerned about the quality of Wikipedia, and the character of the site; believe in the product the community produces (Not altruism, more motivated like Open Source hackers). Yet receiving credit as an author is nearly impossible in Wikipedia, so feelings of individual efficacy and ownership act as a drive, stronger than reputation.

Transformation of Tools Use • Novices use most often: • Search box to locate articles • Edit this page option –this option is very easy to use, effect is immediate and leads to feeling of self-efficacy and reward • Experts use gradually more: • Discussion (talk) pages – about articles and about the community (village pump) • Page histories • Watch list of pages

Transformed perception of Community, Rules, Division of Labour • Novices: • Community? What Community? • Focus on articles, not on people • Unaware of the roles / division of labour • Only aware of the basic rules (stated explicitly) • Experts • Members of the tribe • Define an identity (create an account userpage watch list) • Adopt roles and responsibilities concerned with the treatment of other community members, e.g. arbitrators, administrators • Can earn public recognition for their work, feeling of self-efficacy in influencing the community, and a feeling of power / authority of decision-making.

Increasing Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance • Wikipedia is an organization with highly refined policies, norms and a technological architecture that supports organizational ideals of consensus building and discussion. • The organization is becoming increasingly decentralized as the community grows, both in content-related decision making process and social structures that regulate user behavior

Study • Based on Ostrom’s proposition that the evolution of social norms within a community is more effective in ensuring cooperation than imposing external rules • Approach – phenomenological approachfrom Sociology • Using interviews, layered sampling of subjects, starting with the most central figures in the community

Wikipedian roles • Unregistered users • Registered users (regular users) • With different “power” – power is defined by the number of people who listen to you and are inclined to consider what you want done. • Self-select into formal and informal groups along ideological, functional and content-related lines. • Can hold various technical powers: administrator, bureaucrat, checkuser, oversight, developer, steward. • Arbitration committee ArbCom – general decision making body for the English site; interpreting policy and making binding resolutions in case of interpersonal disputes

Technical roles in Wikipedia

Policy in Wikipedia • Policies are fluid, traditionally intended to echo community practices, editable (it is also a wiki page). • The creation and refinement of policy is a complex social negotiation that takes place across many communication channels (out of Wiki) and in which power, authority and reputation play decisive roles. • Guidelines are strong recommendations for behaviour, content, stylistic conventions, but they aren’t followed as strictly as policies.

Policy making mechanisms • According to Jimmy Wales, 3 mechanisms: • Community-wide vote • Someone editing a policy, and if it sticks, it sticks… • “I just said so” (but he says so only after lengthy discussions by many individuals) • Policy making efforts have slowed down recently… there are already a lot of policies, so no need to create new ones • Decentralization in policy creation • Due to difficulty of achieving consensus about content guidelines as the organization grew proliferation of small decentralized social structures (WikiProjects) • Wiki Projects serve as local jurisdictions in the site within which local leadership, norms and standards for writing are agreed upon by editors familiar with a particular topic (Ostrom Principle 1) • WikiProject Policies are nested within but can’t conflict general Wikipedia guidelines

Policy Interpretation and Enforcement • Difference between content-related policies and behavior-related policies • Interpretation of content-related policies  highly decentralized (Ostrom Principle 3) • Disputes over behaviour-related policies, if not resolved locally, are referred to a formal centralized dispute resolution process with the authority to impose severe punishments • Arb Com takes fewer complex cases and leaves the easier ones to the administrators to sort out • Administrators are no longer a “janitorial role”, but more independent; administration notice boards make decisions on the type of things Arb Com used to do… more power • Blurring of the distinction between social and technical powers of administrators, they are the enforcers of policy and the creators of policy  looming danger of excessive power over the Wikipedianbehaviour • Therefore, it is much harder to become administrator in comparison to before. • Arb Com has limited power now to enforce policies, since it depends on administrators

Social Documents, Wikis