The authors of this paper examine the social role of software tools in Wikipedia, with a particular focus on automatic editing programs and assisted editing tools. The author showed by example that the content of Wikipedia has been modified by people, which may have a bad impact on society. This kind of repair can be done by administrators and some assisted software, and with the development of science and technology, this software also plays more and more roles in the recover. And using trace ethnography, the authors show how these unofficial technologies have fundamentally changed the nature of editing and management in Wikipedia. Specifically, “destructive fighting” can be analyzed as distributed cognition, emphasizing the role of non-human participants in decentralized activities that promote collective intelligence. Overall, this situation shows that software programs are not only used to enforce policies and standards. These tools can take coordinated but decentralized action, and can play a more widespread and effective role in subsequent applications.
I think this paper has given a large number of examples, including the impact of changes on society, and some analogy to perfectly explain the meaning of these network terms, which are very effective illustrations of Wikipedia and the impact of these applications on people’s lives. Among them I think the author made two main points.
- Robots or software, such assisted editing tools, play an increasingly important role in life and work. For example, the article mentioned two editing tools, Huggle, Twinkle, and the author introduced the use of the two software in detail. After reading the introduction, this completely subverted my concept of assisted editing tools. These unofficial tools can greatly help administrators to complete the maintenance work. This also led to the new concept of “trace ethnography”. In my opinion, trace ethnography is a way of generating rich accounts of interaction by combining a fine grained analysis of the various “trace” that are automatically recorded by the project ‟s software alongside an ethnographically derived understanding of the tools, techniques, practices, and procedures that generate such traces. it can integrate the small traces left by people on the Internet. I think it can play a vital role in controlling and monitoring people’s behavior on the Internet. In order to maintain the network environment, I even think we can use this feature more widely.
- The author describes the destructive behavior reform as distributed cognition through analogy of navigation. The user and the machine complete the judgment and then integrate in the network so that the intentional destructiveness can be seen. I think this kind of thinking will even greatly change the way people work in the future. The work introduced in navigation does not even require a lot of professional knowledge, it only needs to be able to read maps and use a magnifying glass. And in future work, people who work do not even need to have sufficient professional knowledge, they only need to be able to understand the information and have the right judgment. This will definitely change the way people work.
Question:
- In the future, will it be possible to complete inspection and maintenance by robots and computers(without people)?
- Is it possible to apply the ideas of trace Ethnography in other fields, such as monitoring cybercrime?
- Assisted editing tools reduce administrators’ requirements for related expertise. Will this change benefit these people in the long run? Does the easier job completion mean easier replacement by machines?
- The article mentioned that we need to consider the social impact of such assisted editing tools. What kind of social impact do you think the various software in your current life have?
Hello!
I had very similar reflections and I really liked the third discussion point, “Assisted editing tools reduce administrators’ requirements for related expertise. Will this change benefit these people in the long run? Does the easier job completion mean easier replacement by machines?”
It is a really interesting point that you bring up here, while these tools make the work of administrator’s a lot easier, are they paving way for a future where these tools would replace the humans themselves? I feel that this is a common theme across multiple AI technologies and it should be taken with a pinch of salt. While it might be a possibility, the paper also talks about the necessity of common sense and human judgment to solve the problem. The solution leverages the complementary strengths of both humans and AI and I do not think that AI would be able to imbibe all of the human strengths in the near future. But I guess we will have to wait and watch.