Journal article
A Forensic Qualitative Analysis of Contributions to Wikipedia from Anonymity Seeking Users
Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction, v 3(CSCW), pp 1-26
07 Nov 2019
Abstract
By choice or by necessity, some contributors to commons-based peer production sites use privacy-protecting services to remain anonymous. As anonymity seekers, users of the Tor network have been cast both as ill-intentioned vandals and as vulnerable populations concerned with their privacy. In this study, we use a dataset drawn from a corpus of Tor edits to Wikipedia to uncover the character of Tor users' contributions. We build in-depth narrative descriptions of Tor users' actions and conduct a thematic analysis that places their editing activity into seven broad groups. We find that although their use of a privacy-protecting service marks them as unusual within Wikipedia, the character of many Tor users' contributions is in line with the expectations and norms of Wikipedia. However, our themes point to several important places where lack of trust promotes disorder, and to contributions where risks to contributors, service providers, and communities are unaligned.
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4 citations in Scopus
Details
- Title
- A Forensic Qualitative Analysis of Contributions to Wikipedia from Anonymity Seeking Users
- Creators
- Kaylea Champion - University of WashingtonNora McDonald - Drexel University, Information ScienceStephanie Bankes - Drexel UniversityJoseph Zhang - Drexel UniversityRachel Greenstadt - New York UniversityAndrea Forte - Drexel UniversityBenjamin Mako Hill - University of Washington
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction, v 3(CSCW), pp 1-26
- Publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Information Science
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-85075058939
- Other Identifier
- 991019173577504721