Paper: Willever-Farr, H. L., & Forte, A. (2014). Family Matters: Control and Conflict in Online Family History Production. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 475–486). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Discussion Leader: Sukrit V
Summary:
This paper explores two family history research (FHR) communities: findagrave.com and ancestry.com. FHR communities are uniquely distinct from online encyclopedia communities such as Wikipedia in that they exist to meet an individual’s or family’s needs and wants, taking into account identity building and memorialization.
This work aims to answer three questions, namely:
- What tensions and conflicts arise as FHRs engage both individuals/their families and the public in the construction of historical information.
- How are these tensions and conflicts negotiated?
- How do these FHR communities constrain and support negotiation of these tensions?
In order to answer these questions, the authors performed a qualitative study on message boards, forum data and interviews with FHRs.
They noted that Ancestry’s policies forced most users to make their familial information private, while Find a Grave’s content moderation policies and lack of recommendations allowed for higher quality research-backed content.
Their interviewees spoke about their personal and public-oriented motivations for contributing to these communities as well as factors that detracted from their participation in these communities.
The authors conclude with a discussion of policy and design considerations.
Reflection:
It was interesting to see how Ancestry.com, which was a paid service, had lower quality contributions (thanks to the “clickologists”) than Findagrave.com. The authors attributed this to the way Ancestry is marketed and its automated suggestion tools.
In addition, all the contributors to the FHR communities fiercely defended their family tree’s “turf”, yet viewed the sites as a historical resource for the public. The members even went to other graveyards to collect and share information about non-related individuals because others may need that information.
Ancestry’s problems with inaccurate content, bogus “poison-ivy” suggestions and content curation policies led to all but one of the interviewees to make their family trees private – thus reducing the viability of Ancestry as a public information source. Clearly, this is indicative of how policies on any ‘social networking’-esque site can ruin or boost its reputation among users. Ancestry even has arrangements with archival repositories in the US and Europe to make records available to subscribers, and yet, has lower quality content that Find a Grave.
The authors note that inexperienced users on FHR communities require instruction. Their design consideration of including “learning spaces” within these communities could prove particularly useful in increasing content quality.
One benefit of the familial oversight of content in these FHR communities, however, is that it facilitated a sense of ownership and thus allowed for certain individuals to have ‘domain’ over certain parts of the knowledge base. Yet, this same oversight also hindered others from contributing (possibly) accurate information – due to the volunteers of Find a Grave becoming overwhelmed. Perhaps allowing for Find a Grave community members to be elevated to the post of moderators would alleviate this issue.
It is interesting to note that certain members of these FHR communities competed with one another to boost the number of memorials on the website. The authors do not discuss why contributors would want to do so, however. Perhaps each person’s profile has a number of how many they have contributed to – and thus, gamification is something that should be avoided.
Interviewing the volunteers and the owner of Find a Grave, and even Ancestry would perhaps provide more fruitful insights into these communities. Perhaps analyzing the requirements and needs of Find a Grave’s volunteers would indicate that they did not need help or did not believe that the community members could serve as moderators.
Further, FHR sites should include a standard set of guidelines when contributing that includes what information should be provided, how it should be written and also ask for specific sources or proof.
Questions:
- Why do you think Ancestry.com, a paid service (almost $189-$299 a year), had more “clickologists” or “fake researchers” than Findagrave.com, a free-to-use, freely accessible service?
- Clearly, Find a Grave needs more volunteers. Do you think existing community members should be allowed to become moderators? Why or why not?
- Would you ever contribute to either of these two communities? If yes, would you make your family tree public or private?
- How would you improve Ancestry’s ‘hint’ feature? (Perhaps suggestions from humans as opposed to automated suggestions would improve the quality of connections.)
- Ancestry now includes DNA analysis to “reveal your ethnic mix and ancestors you never knew you had”. Do you think this would improve user trust in the website?
