Summary
The paper examines the roles of software tools in English language Wikipedia. The authors shed light on the process of counter-vandalism in Wikipedia. They explain in detail how participants and their assisted editing tools review Wikipedia contributions and enforce standards. They show that the editing process in Wikipedia is not a disconnected activity where editors force their views on others. Specifically, vandal fighting is shown as a distributed cognition process where users come to know their projects and users who edit it in a way that is impossible for a single individual. The authors claim the blocking of a vandal a cognitive process made possible by a complex network of interactions between humans, encyclopedia articles, software systems, and databases. Humans and non-humans work to produce and maintain a social order in the collaborative production of an encyclopedia with hundreds of thousands of diverse and often unorganized contributors. The authors introduce trace ethnography as a method of studying the seemingly ad-hoc assemblage of editors, administrators, bots, assisted editing tools, and others who constitute Wikipedia’s vandal fighting network.
Reflection
The paper comes off as a survey paper. I found that the authors explained some methods that already existed and used one of the authors experience to elaborate on others’ work. I couldn’t see their contribution but maybe that was needed 10 years ago? The tools that they mentioned (Huggle, AIV, Twinkle, ..etc.) were standard tools to be used when editing Wikipedia’s articles and monitoring edits made by others. They reflected on how those tools were helpful in a manner that made fighting vandalism an easier task. They mention that these tools facilitate viewing each edited article by linking it with a detailed edit summary with an explanation why it was done, by whom, and related IP addresses. They explain how they use such software to detect vandalism and how to revert back to the correct version of the article. They presented a case study of a Wikipedia vandal and showed logs of the changes that he was able to make in an hour. The authors also referenced Ed hutchins who explains how cognitive work must be performed in order to keep US Navy ships on course at any given time. And how that is a similar reference to what it takes to manage Wikipedia. Technological actors in Wikipedia, such as Huggle, make what would be a difficult task into a mundane affair. Reverting edits becomes a matter of pressing a button. The paper was informative for someone who hasn’t worked on editing Wiki articles but I thought that this paper could have been presented as a tutorial, it would’ve been more beneficial.
Discussion
- Have you worked on Wikipedia article editing before?
- Did you encounter using the tools mentioned in the paper?
- Is there any application that comes to mind where this can be used other than Wikipedia?
- Do you think such tools could be beneficial when it comes to open source software version control?
- How would this method generalize to open source software version control?
I want to disagree on your point that this paper is more of a survey paper and would’ve served better as a tutorial, but I see the logic in the reflection there. I think it is still useful to have something like this being put out there as public knowledge and I think it contained important information, especially how they traced the banning of a vandal. I think the paper deserves its place because it made CSCW researchers aware that these tools exist and were created outside the research sphere, that the actual volunteers using them find them extremely useful, that these tools are battle tested and worthy of attention, that these are the gold standard that any new tools developed by researchers will have to beat in when it comes to usability and usefulness. A tutorial paper would not have given it the same spotlight because it is not as “important”.
I initially agreed with the thought that the paper was oddly formatted, but I soon realized it was noticing a novel interaction between bot and human – 15 years ago editing bots were new and how they assisted users in this kind of interaction hadn’t been studied yet. The interaction of the two and how this type of software works can be improved by better understanding the kind of cyborg-type relationship that was forming here.
I have edited a few wikipedia articles before, here and there, but unfortunately didn’t know of this software at the time. I feel like these applications would not have helped me, however, as I was adding new information at the time (as part of an assignment).