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
 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
 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
 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
 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,
 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
 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
 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 established in 2001
• 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
 Patterns of cooperation and
conflict
• Fernanda Viegas
history flow
visualization

http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/hist
ory_flow/
 History flow: four patterns
• Vandalism and Repair
• Anonymity vs. named authorship
• Negotiation
• Content Stability
Abortio
n

Chocola
te
Microso
ft
 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
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
• 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
 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
approach from 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;
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
 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
• ArbCom 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 Wikipedian behaviour
• 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