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Communicating about some vital topics---such as sexuality and health---is treated as taboo and subjected to censorship. How can we construct knowledge about these topics? Wikipedia is home to numerous high-quality knowledge artifacts about taboo topics like sexual organs and human reproduction. How did these artifacts come into being? How is their existence sustained? This mixed-methods comparative project builds on previous work on taboo topics in Wikipedia and draws from qualitative and quantitative approaches. We follow a sequential complementary design, developing a narrative articulation of the life of taboo articles, comparing them to nontaboo articles, and examining some of their quantifiable traits. We find that taboo knowledge artifacts develop through multiple successful collaboration styles and, unsurprisingly, that taboo subjects are the sites of conflict. We identify and describe six themes in the development of taboo knowledge artifacts. These artifacts needresilient leadershipandengaged organizationsto thrive under conditions oflimited identifiabilityanddisjointed sensemaking, while contributors simultaneously engage inemergent governanceandimagining public audiences. Our observations have important implications for supporting public knowledge work on controversial subjects such as taboos and more generally. 

Content moderation practices and technologies need to change over time as requirements and community expectations shift. However, attempts to restructure the existing moderation practices can be difficult, especially for platforms that rely on their communities to moderate, because changes can transform the workflow and workload participants' reward systems. By examining the extensive archival discussions around a prepublication moderation technology on Wikipedia named Flagged Revisions, complemented by seven semi-structured interviews, we identify various challenges in restructuring community-based moderation practices. Thus, we find that while a new system might sound good in theory and perform well in terms of quantitative metrics, it may conflict with existing social norms. Furthermore, our findings underscore how the relationship between platforms and self-governed communities can hinder the ability to assess the performance of any new system and introduce considerable costs related to maintaining, overhauling, or scrapping any piece of infrastructure. 

What types of governance arrangements make some self-governed online groups more vulnerable to disinformation campaigns? We present a qualitative comparative analysis of the Croatian and Serbian Wikipedia editions to answer this question. We do so because between at least 2011 and 2020, the Croatian language version of Wikipedia was taken over by a small group of administrators who introduced far-right bias and outright disinformation. Dissenting editorial voices were reverted, banned, and blocked. Although Serbian, Bosnian, and Serbo-Croatian Wikipedias share many linguistic and cultural features, and faced similar threats, they seem to have largely avoided this fate. Based on a grounded theory analysis of interviews with members of these communities and others in cross-functional platform-level roles, we propose that the convergence of three features---high perceived value as a target, limited early bureaucratic openness, and a preference for personalistic, informal forms of organization over formal ones---produced a window of opportunity for governance capture on Croatian Wikipedia. Our findings illustrate that online community governing infrastructures can play a crucial role in systematic disinformation campaigns and other influence operations. 

Because open source software relies on individuals who select their own tasks, it is often underproduced-a term used by software engineering researchers to describe when a piece of software's relative quality is lower than its relative importance. We examine the social and technical factors associated with underproduction through a comparison of software packaged by the Debian GNU/Linux community. We test a series of hypotheses developed from a reading of prior research in software engineering. Although we find that software age and programming language age offer a partial explanation for variation in underproduction, we were surprised to find that the association between underproduction and package age is weaker at high levels of programming language age. With respect to maintenance efforts, we find that additional resources are not always tied to better outcomes. In particular, having higher numbers of contributors is associated with higher underproduction risk. Also, contrary to our expectations, maintainer turnover and maintenance by a declared team are not associated with lower rates of underproduction. Finally, we find that the people working on bugs in underproduced packages tend to be those who are more central to the community's collaboration network structure, although contributors' betweenness centrality (often associated with brokerage in social networks) is not associated with underproduction. 

Platforms often host multiple online groups with overlapping topics and members. How can researchers and designers understand how related groups affect each other? Inspired by population ecology, prior research in social computing and human-computer interaction has studied related groups by correlating group size with degrees of overlap in content and membership, but has produced puzzling results: overlap is associated with competition in some contexts but with mutual-ism in others. We suggest that this inconsistency results from aggregating intergroup relationships into an overall environmental effect that obscures the diversity of competition and mutualism among related groups. Drawing on the framework of community ecology, we introduce a time-series method for inferring competition and mutualism. We then use this frame-work to inform a large-scale analysis of clusters of subreddits that all have high user overlap. We find that mutualism is more common than competition. 

Why do some peer production projects do a better job at engaging potential contributors than others? We address this question by comparing three Indian language Wikipedias, namely, Malayalam, Marathi, and Kannada. We found that although the three projects share goals, technological infrastructure, and a similar set of challenges, Malayalam Wikipedia’s community engages language speakers in contributing at a much higher rate than the others. Drawing from a grounded theory analysis of interviews with 18 community participants from the three projects, we found that experience with participatory governance and free/open-source software in the Malayalam community supported high engagement of contributors. Counterintuitively, we found that financial resources intended to increase participation in the Marathi and Kannada communities hindered the growth of these communities. Our findings underscore the importance of social and cultural context in the trajectories of peer production communities. 

Adopting new technology is challenging for volunteer moderation teams of online communities. Challenges are aggravated when communities increase in size. In a prior qualitative study, Kiene et al. found evidence that moderator teams adapted to challenges by relying on their experience in other technological platforms to guide the creation and adoption of innovative custom moderation "bots." In this study, we test three hypotheses on the social correlates of user innovated bot usage drawn from a previous qualitative study. We find strong evidence of the proposed relationship between community size and the use of user innovated bots. Although previous work suggests that smaller teams of moderators will be more likely to use these bots and that users with experience moderating in the previous platform will be more likely to do so, we find little evidence in support of either proposition. 

User-generated content sites routinely block contributions from users of privacy-enhancing proxies like Tor because of a perception that proxies are a source of vandalism, spam, and abuse. Although these blocks might be effective, collateral damage in the form of unrealized valuable contributions from anonymity seekers is invisible. One of the largest and most important user-generated content sites, Wikipedia, has attempted to block contributions from Tor users since as early as 2005. We demonstrate that these blocks have been imperfect and that thousands of attempts to edit on Wikipedia through Tor have been successful. We draw upon several data sources and analytical techniques to measure and describe the history of Tor editing on Wikipedia over time and to compare contributions from Tor users to those from other groups of Wikipedia users. Our analysis suggests that although Tor users who slip through Wikipedia's ban contribute content that is more likely to be reverted and to revert others, their contributions are otherwise similar in quality to those from other unregistered participants and to the initial contributions of registered users.