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  1. 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. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available April 17, 2025
  2. Peer produced goods, such as online knowledge bases and free/libre open source software rely on contributors who often choose their tasks regardless of consumer needs. These goods are susceptible to underproduction: when popular goods are relatively low quality. Although underproduction is a common feature of peer production, very little is known about how to counteract it. We use a detailed longitudinal dataset from English Wikipedia to show that more experienced contributors—including those who contribute without an account—tend to contribute to underproduced goods. A within-person analysis shows that contributors’ efforts shift toward underproduced goods over time. These findings illustrate the value of retaining contributors in peer production, including those contributing without accounts, as a means to counter underproduction.

     
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  3. By definition, people are reticent or even unwilling to talk about taboo subjects. Because subjects like sexuality, health, and violence are taboo in most cultures, important information on each of these subjects can be difficult to obtain. Are peer produced knowledge bases like Wikipedia a promising approach for providing people with information on taboo subjects? With its reliance on volunteers who might also be averse to taboo, can the peer production model produce high-quality information on taboo subjects? In this paper, we seek to understand the role of taboo in knowledge bases produced by volunteers. We do so by developing a novel computational approach to identify taboo subjects and by using this method to identify a set of articles on taboo subjects in English Wikipedia. We find that articles on taboo subjects are more popular than non-taboo articles and that they are frequently vandalized. Despite frequent vandalism attacks, we also find that taboo articles are higher quality than non-taboo articles. We hypothesize that stigmatizing 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. 
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  4. Abstract

    Although peer production has created valuable information goods like Wikipedia, the GNU/Linux operating system, and Reddit, the majority of attempts at peer production achieve very little. In work groups and teams, coordination and social integration—manifested via dense, integrative communication networks—predict success. We hypothesize that the conditions in which new peer production communities operate make communication problems common and make coordination and integration more difficult, and that variation in the structure of project communication networks will predict project success. In this article, we measure communication networks for 999 early-stage peer production wikis. We assess whether communities displaying network markers of coordination and social integration are more productive and long-lasting. Contrary to our expectations, we find a very weak relationship between communication structure and collaborative performance. We propose that technology may serve as a partial substitute for communication in coordinating work and integrating newcomers in peer production.

     
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  5. Many online communities rely on postpublication moderation where contributors-even those that are perceived as being risky-are allowed to publish material immediately and where moderation takes place after the fact. An alternative arrangement involves moderating content before publication. A range of communities have argued against prepublication moderation by suggesting that it makes contributing less enjoyable for new members and that it will distract established community members with extra moderation work. We present an empirical analysis of the effects of a prepublication moderation system called FlaggedRevs that was deployed by several Wikipedia language editions. We used panel data from 17 large Wikipedia editions to test a series of hypotheses related to the effect of the system on activity levels and contribution quality. We found that the system was very effective at keeping low-quality contributions from ever becoming visible. Although there is some evidence that the system discouraged participation among users without accounts, our analysis suggests that the system's effects on contribution volume and quality were moderate at most. Our findings imply that concerns regarding the major negative effects of prepublication moderation systems on contribution quality and project productivity may be overstated.

     
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  6. 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. 
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  7. 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. 
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  8. Large-scale quantitative analyses have shown that individuals frequently talk to each other about similar things in different online spaces. Why do these overlapping communities exist? We provide an answer grounded in the analysis of 20 interviews with active participants in clusters of highly related subreddits. Within a broad topical area, there are a diversity of benefits an online community can confer. These include (a) specific information and discussion, (b) socialization with similar others, and (c) attention from the largest possible audience. A single community cannot meet all three needs. Our findings suggest that topical areas within an online community platform tend to become populated by groups of specialized communities with diverse sizes, topical boundaries, and rules. Compared with any single community, such systems of overlapping communities are able to provide a greater range of benefits. 
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