2023:Program/Submissions/Taboo Articles - VBNBLQ

The following is a mirror of what are publicly available details of submission made at the call for proposal platform, Pretalx. Any changes here may be overwritten by a bot while syncing updates from Pretalx ([1]). Changes are monitored and may be updated into Pretalx if they do not change the context of the submission (i.e. correcting typographical errors).

Title: Taboo Articles

Speakers:

Kaylea Champion

Kaylea Champion (User:khascall) is a PhD Candidate in Communication at University of Washington. She studies how people cooperate to build public goods like GNU/Linux and Wikipedia, including what gets built and maintained (and what doesn't), who takes part (and who is excluded), and how organizations form (and fall apart).

Benjamin Mako Hill

In my day job, I teach and do research at the University of Washington. I am also an active editor on several wikis and work with the Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation community to support academic research related to wikis and Wikimedia in a number of ways. Please see my user page on meta for more information.

Pretalx link

Etherpad link

Room:

Start time:

End time:

Type: Lightning talk

Track: Research, Science, and Medicine

Submission state: submitted

Duration: 10 minutes

Do not record: false

Presentation language: en

Abstract & description

Abstract

Useful knowledge about taboo subjects like sexuality can be hard to find because people are often less likely to want to share this kind of information. We wondered if articles aboaut taboo topics on Wikipedia were less good than similar articles on nontaboo subjects. We found that Wikipedians are succeeding in developing high-quality articles about these in-demand topics despite many challenges. Join us for a brief dive into taboo subjects on Wikipedia!

Description

Subjects like sexuality, health, and violence are taboo in most cultures, making important information on each difficult to obtain. Our research asked, since Wikipedians are volunteers who might also be averse to taboo, are they able to produce high-quality information on taboo subjects? Our project identified a set of articles on taboo subjects in English Wikipedia and analyzed their popularity, growth, and contributors. We find that articles on taboo subjects are more popular than non-taboo articles and that they are frequently subject to vandalism. Despite frequent attacks, we also find that taboo articles are higher quality. We hypothesized that societal attitudes will lead contributors to taboo subjects to seek to be less identifiable. Although our results are consistent with this proposal in several ways, we surprisingly find that contributors make themselves more identifiable in others.

Further details

Qn. How does your session relate to the event themes: Diversity, Collaboration Future?

Taboo topics including subjects like women's health that are often described as a source of "content gap" in Wikipedia that is both the result of a lack of diversity in Wikipedia's editor community and an example of a diversity challenge itself. Our project is entirely about the collaborative dynamics that drive participation in Wikipedia.

Qn. What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?

Everyone can participate in this session

Qn. What is the most appropriate format for this session?

• Onsite in Singapore
• Remote online participation, livestreamed
• Remote from a satellite event
• Hybrid with some participants in Singapore and others dialing in remotely
• Pre-recorded and available on demand