Hi everyone,
The next research showcase will be live-streamed this Wednesday, May 13 at 11.30 PT. The streaming link will be posted on the lists a few minutes before the showcase starts and as usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research.
We look forward to seeing you!
Leila
This month
*The people's classifier: Towards an open model for algorithmic infrastructure* By Aaron Halfaker https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Halfak_(WMF)
Recent research has implicated that Wikipedia's algorithmic infrastructure is perpetuating social issues. However, these same algorithmic tools are critical to maintaining efficiency of open projects like Wikipedia at scale. But rather than simply critiquing algorithmic wiki-tools and calling for less algorithmic infrastructure, I'll propose a different strategy -- an open approach to building this algorithmic infrastructure. In this presentation, I'll demo a set of services that are designed to open a critical part Wikipedia's quality control infrastructure -- machine classifiers. I'll also discuss how this strategy unites critical/feminist HCI with more dominant narratives about efficiency and productivity.
*Social transparency online* By Jennifer Marlow http://www.aboutjmarlow.com/ and Laura Dabbish http://www.lauradabbish.com/
An emerging Internet trend is greater social transparency, such as the use of real names in social networking sites, feeds of friends' activities, traces of others' re-use of content, and visualizations of team interactions. There is a potential for this transparency to radically improve coordination, particularly in open collaboration settings like Wikipedia. In this talk, we will describe some of our research identifying how transparency influences collaborative performance in online work environments. First, we have been studying professional social networking communities. Social media allows individuals in these communities to create an interest network of people and digital artifacts, and get moment-by-moment updates about actions by those people or changes to those artifacts. It affords and unprecedented level of transparency about the actions of others over time. We will describe qualitative work examining how members of these communities use transparency to accomplish their goals. Second, we have been looking at the impact of making workflows transparent. In a series of field experiments we are investigating how socially transparent interfaces, and activity trace information in particular, influence perceptions and behavior towards others and evaluations of their work.