With the help of my advisor, Dr. David Ribes, I recently got a chapter of my master’s thesis accepted to the ACM conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, to be held in February 2010 in Savannah, Georgia. It is titled “The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal” and focuses on the roles of automated ‘bots’ and assisted editing tools in Wikipedia’s ‘vandal fighting’ network.
Abstract: In this paper, we examine the social roles of software tools in the English-language Wikipedia, specifically focusing on autonomous editing programs and assisted editing tools. This qualitative research builds on recent research in which we quantitatively demonstrate the growing prevalence of such software in recent years. Using trace ethnography, we show how these often-unofficial technologies have fundamentally transformed the nature of editing and administration in Wikipedia. Specifically, we analyze „vandal fighting‟ as an epistemic process of distributed cognition, highlighting the role of non-human actors in enabling a decentralized activity of collective intelligence. In all, this case shows that software programs are used for more than enforcing policies and standards. These tools enable coordinated yet decentralized action, independent of the specific norms currently in force.
Congrats, it’s a great paper.
Link | October 30th, 2009 at 11:03 am
Civics, Popular Media & Participatory Culture» Blog Archive » Tracing the traces in online spaces wrote:
[...] Geiger, R. S. and Ribes, D. (2010) The Work of Sustaining Order in Wikipedia: The Banning of a Vandal. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), ACM, New York (2010). Retrieved from: http://www.stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/academic-works/2009/10/28/the-work-of-sustaining-order-in-wiki... [...]
Link | July 6th, 2010 at 11:10 pm
Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices | R. Stuart Geiger wrote:
[...] pretty broad applications for studying highly-distributed groups. It’s an inversion of the previous paper we presented at CSCW, showing in detail how we traced how Wikipedian vandal fighters as they collectively work to [...]
Link | January 7th, 2011 at 3:37 pm
Great paper! We are using it in the CSCW masters course I’m teaching at the University of Bergen, Norway.
Link | January 26th, 2012 at 1:53 am