Vortrag im Rahmen des "Bergwinters" am 24.03.2016, Universitätszentrum Obergurgl der Universität Innsbruck, Obergurgl, Österreich

1. Fehlende Diversität und Autorenschwund in der Wikipedia:
Ausgrenzung durch grenzenlose Organisation?
Leonhard Dobusch
Professor für Betriebswirtschaftslehre mit Schwerpunkt Organisation
Institut für Organisation und Lernen
Bergwinter 2016
Universitätszentrum Obergurgl, 24. März 2016
Dieses Werk steht unter der Lizenz
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

4. Wikipedia...
... setzt auf das Kollektiv und ...
... propagiert Inklusivität als ...
... grenzenlose Organisation?

5. Quelle: http://www.taz.de/!5127514/

6. Quelle: http://derstandard.at/2000022296889/Studie-Wikipedia-wird-vom-reichen-Westen-dominiert

7. Quelle: http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/leben/gesellschaft/Der-Schwarm-bei-Wikipedia-schrumpft/story/11486176

11. Organisationen und ihre Grenzen
Wikipedia: Grenzen für Partizipation?
Grenzen für organisationale Offenheit

12. Organisationen und ihre Grenzen

13. Organisationssysteme
sind soziale Systeme, die
aus Entscheidungen
bestehen und
Entscheidungen
wechselseitig miteinander
verknüpfen.
“
Bild: Sonntag, CC-BY-SA-3.0, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luhmann.png
Niklas Luhmann

14. Grenzen zwischen Organisation und
Umwelt als Folge von Entscheidungen

15. Nils
Brunsson & Göran Ahrne
organization as
a decided order“
Bild: http://www.laisumedu.org/DESIN_Ibarra/desin/Brunsson.htm

16. Mitgliedschaft
Wikipedia:
Selbstidentifikation und Beitragspraktiken

17. Wikipedia-Seite im Bearbeitungsmodus

18. (Selbst-)Beobachtung und Regeln
Wikipedia:
Peer Review, Relevanzkriterien

19. Quelle: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Relevanzkriterien

22. Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians"
Inklusionismus

23. Deletionismus
Bild: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Wikipe-tan_on_the_haystack.png
Association of Deletionist Wikipedians

24. Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgments
About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who
Are in Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but
That Doesn't Mean They Are Deletionists
Bild: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTAD.svg

25. Bild: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTAD.svg
Vereinigung von Wikipedianerinnen und Wikipedianern, die
undifferenzierten Urteilen über den enzyklopädischen Wert ganzer
Themenbereiche kritisch gegenüberstehen, jedoch die Löschung
besonders schlechter Artikel unterstützen, ohne deshalb
Deletionisten zu sein

26. Sanktionen
Wikipedia: Löschung, Sperrung

27. notabilia.net

28. notabilia.net

29. notabilia.net

30. Benutzersperrung auf Wikipedia

31. Hierarchie
Wikipedia: explizit & (in)formal

32. Kathrin Passig (2016):
https://merton-magazin.de/die-hand-am-server-ist-die-hand-die-die-welt-regiert

33. Bomis

34. Seit 2004:
Wahlen, Abstimmungen, Umfragen

35. Wahlen zum Wikimedia
Stiftungsrat, Schiedsgericht
400 Editierungen,
4 Monate aktiv
Wahlen für
AdministratorInnen etc.
200 Editierungen
2 Monate aktiv
Urabstimmung über Lizenz 25 Editierungen
vor dem Stichtag
Grenzziehung: willkürlich, aber transparent

36. alle
keine
Nutzungsrechte in der
englischen Wikipedia

37. Nutzungsrechte in der
deutschen Wikipedia
keine
alle

38. [M]it der Bedeutung der
Entscheidungen [nimmt]
dann auch die Bedeutung
von Entscheidern zu - und
umgekehrt. Das
Entscheidungssystem
tendiert ... zum Aufbau
einer Hierarchie.
“
Bild: Sonntag, CC-BY-SA-3.0, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luhmann.png
Niklas Luhmann

39. Wikipedia: Grenzen für Partizipation?

40. Rückgang an Beförderung zu AdminstratorInnen
Bild: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/

41. Stagnation von aktiv Beitragenden
Bild: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/07/3-charts-that-show-how-wikipedia-is-running-out-of-admins/259829/

42. The average Wikipedian on the English
Wikipedia is (1) a male, (2) technically
inclined, (3) formally educated, (4) an
English speaker (native or non-native), (5)
aged 15–49, (6) from a majority-Christian
country, (7) from a developed nation, (8)
from the Northern Hemisphere, and (9)
likely employed as a white-collar worker or
enrolled as a student rather than being
employed as a laborer.
“
Wikipedia:Systemic Bias,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Systemic_bias

43. [I]t’s being written by middle-aged white
guys.“ Sarah Stierch,
Wikipedian-in-Residence at Smithsonian

45. Spiegelbild gesellschaftlicher
(Geschlechter-)Verhältnisse?
Quelle: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Zero_1_Mumbai_Guy_on_phone.jpg

46. Spiegelbild gesellschaftlicher
(Geschlechter-)Verhältnisse?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Being_any_Gender_is_a_drag_-_World_Pride_London_2012_(7527764372).jpg

47. Hacker-Kultur
und Offenheit
für »Trolle«
Quelle: David Lerner, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_troll.jpg, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

48. Usability: Wiki-Syntax
Quelle: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editing_Wikipedia_p_11,_wiki_markup_illustration_1.png

49. Mehr Edits von Algorithmen (»Bots«):
0
25
50
75
100
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
editcountinpercentperyearineachusergroup
Anonymous users Bots
Registered users
an
cr
W
(c
ac
th
Th
na
in
br
fe
se
ten
ed
- tAus: Müller-Birn, C./Dobusch, L./Herbsleb, J. D. (2013): Work-to-rule: the emergence of algorithmic governance in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the 6th
International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T ’13), ACM, 80–89.

50. Wikipedia-
spezifisch
Gesamt-
gesellschaftlich
Sozial
Technisch
»Bots«
Hackerkultur
Trolle
Spiegelbild der
Geschlechtverhältnisse
Usability
Gründe
für Exklusion
in Wikipedia
Zugang
zum Internet
0
25
50
75
100
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
editcountinpercentperyearineachusergroup
Anonymous users Bots
Registered users
Figure 3: Development of edits per user group (registered user,
anonymous user, bot) in the Wikipedia’s administrative names-
pace 4.
continuously increasing in number. Since bots have shown their
usefulness for a wide variety of tasks in the main namespace, their
scope has steadily expanded, and more edits have taken place in
other namespaces.
This contradicts a community guideline that suggests the avoidance
of editing activities of bots outside the article namespace. However,
in 2012, these “outside” edits accounted for over 40 percent of all
bot edits. This emergence of bot activity all over the community
project is an indication of the growing importance of these “lit-
tle helpers” for the community’s activities. This relates to a study
that analyzed the diversification of human edits over the different
namespaces. In 2001, about 90 percent of all edits were carried
out in the article namespace, but in 2006, this number had already
decreased to 70 percent [15]. We assume that the change in the
community engagement of bot operators also expanded the reach
of bot edits. More interestingly, while human edits slowed down in
Wikipedia’s community space, edits carried out by bots increased
as shown in Figure 3. In this administrative space, 20 different bots
have been active on average (disregarding wikilink-bots).
In the next part of our analysis, we specifically look at the types of
activities bots carry out. Our interest is twofold: first, we classify
tasks executed by bots in order to understand their relatedness to
existing social governance mechanisms. Second, we examine our
assumption of increasingly algorithmic rule enforcement by bots.
We collected task descriptions from bots’ user pages to examine
the kinds of activities in which bots are participating in the Wiki-
pedia community. In single, doubtful cases we matched edits with
their task descriptions to identify discrepancies and exclude those
activities. Based on these data, we defined general activity types
that are indicated in the first column of the table 1. These general
activity types were defined in three steps. During the first round,
we coded existing task descriptions collaboratively (around 100)
until we had an almost stable set of activities. In the second round,
we separately coded the remaining task descriptions. In the third
round, we checked the assigned codes and compared them with
our own decisions, and collaboratively coded all task descriptions
that needed new activity types. In order to create a shared under-
standing of existing activity types, the second and third rounds were
an iterative process. Newly introduced activity types were always
cross-validated over the whole data set.
We clustered the manually defined sets of activities in activity types
(cf. second column of the table 1) and identified three foci of bot
activities (cf. fifth column of the table 1): (1) the content focus, (2)
the task focus, and (3) the community focus.
The first category contains mainly bots that are active in the article
namespace. These bots are created primarily to support the curat-
ing activities of their operators (for example, by using Autowiki-
browser – a semi-automated MediaWiki editor13
) or to connect dif-
ferent language versions of a page through interwiki-links. The
second category comprises bots that are used to support the main-
tenance work of editors by compiling working lists or by informing
editors about existing status changes on articles. The third category
- the community focus - refers to activities that are rather unrelated
to encyclopedic articles; they are more related to community rules
and their enforcement.
Four bots have a community focus: the CopperBot, GiftBot, Items-
bot and xqbot. The CopperBot is the German equivalent to the
HagermanBot of the English Wikipedia [8] that is responsible for
signing unsigned comments on discussion pages. The main task of
the Itemsbot was welcoming new users to the German Wikipedia
by leaving a message on their personal discussion pages. Probably
because of the aforementioned community consensus against bot
welcome messages, the bot stopped working within two months.
In 2008 and 2009, the operator of the Giftbot requested a bot flag
for her bot in order to correct spelling mistakes. In both cases, the
request was denied. In July 2010, the third request was successful.
This time, the bot tasks included the removal of processed flagged
revision requests, the dissemination of a newsletter that contains
information on new edits on pages such as polls, and requests for
banning users as well. All these activities were much more fo-
cused on specific community needs. We assume that the operator
of Giftbot learned much more about existing rules and guidelines
over time and was therefore much better able to meet the needs of
her fellows.
The last of the four community bots is introduced in more detail in
the next section. We show in an exemplary way how the activity
set employed by this bot changes over time.
5.3.1 Example: xqbot
In October 2008, the editor applied for a bot flag for her xqbot in
order to request speedy deletions of orphan pages14
or remains of
moved pages. In November 2008, the bot flag was assigned and
the bot started working. Soon after this, the bot activities included
over ten different tasks such as correcting double redirects, fixing
links on disambiguation pages, adding missing references tags in
articles, and the setting of interwiki-links. All these tasks were
mainly focused on quality improvements to encyclopedic articles.
In 2010, the focus changed in terms of additional tasks. This was
motivated mainly by a procedural problem that occurred during an
administrator re-election.
In January 2010, one participant initiated a discussion by question-
ing the procedure to take care of obsolete votes [31], [32]. The
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowse
14
Orphan pages on Wikipedia are articles that have no or very few
incoming links.

52. »Objective Revision Evaluation Service«
Quelle: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Objective_Revision_Evaluation_Service_logo.svg

53. Quelle: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ORES_edit_quality_flow.svg

54. Grenzen für organisationale Offenheit

55. Wikipedia-
spezifisch
Gesamt-
gesellschaftlich
Sozial
Technisch
Pfadabhängigkeit
»Bots«
Hackerkultur
Trolle
Spiegelbild der
Geschlechtverhältnisse
Usability
Gründe
für Exklusion
in Wikipedia
?
0
25
50
75
100
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
editcountinpercentperyearineachusergroup
Anonymous users Bots
Registered users
Figure 3: Development of edits per user group (registered user,
anonymous user, bot) in the Wikipedia’s administrative names-
pace 4.
continuously increasing in number. Since bots have shown their
usefulness for a wide variety of tasks in the main namespace, their
scope has steadily expanded, and more edits have taken place in
other namespaces.
This contradicts a community guideline that suggests the avoidance
of editing activities of bots outside the article namespace. However,
in 2012, these “outside” edits accounted for over 40 percent of all
bot edits. This emergence of bot activity all over the community
project is an indication of the growing importance of these “lit-
tle helpers” for the community’s activities. This relates to a study
that analyzed the diversification of human edits over the different
namespaces. In 2001, about 90 percent of all edits were carried
out in the article namespace, but in 2006, this number had already
decreased to 70 percent [15]. We assume that the change in the
community engagement of bot operators also expanded the reach
of bot edits. More interestingly, while human edits slowed down in
Wikipedia’s community space, edits carried out by bots increased
as shown in Figure 3. In this administrative space, 20 different bots
have been active on average (disregarding wikilink-bots).
In the next part of our analysis, we specifically look at the types of
activities bots carry out. Our interest is twofold: first, we classify
tasks executed by bots in order to understand their relatedness to
existing social governance mechanisms. Second, we examine our
assumption of increasingly algorithmic rule enforcement by bots.
We collected task descriptions from bots’ user pages to examine
the kinds of activities in which bots are participating in the Wiki-
pedia community. In single, doubtful cases we matched edits with
their task descriptions to identify discrepancies and exclude those
activities. Based on these data, we defined general activity types
that are indicated in the first column of the table 1. These general
activity types were defined in three steps. During the first round,
we coded existing task descriptions collaboratively (around 100)
until we had an almost stable set of activities. In the second round,
we separately coded the remaining task descriptions. In the third
round, we checked the assigned codes and compared them with
our own decisions, and collaboratively coded all task descriptions
that needed new activity types. In order to create a shared under-
standing of existing activity types, the second and third rounds were
an iterative process. Newly introduced activity types were always
cross-validated over the whole data set.
We clustered the manually defined sets of activities in activity types
(cf. second column of the table 1) and identified three foci of bot
activities (cf. fifth column of the table 1): (1) the content focus, (2)
the task focus, and (3) the community focus.
The first category contains mainly bots that are active in the article
namespace. These bots are created primarily to support the curat-
ing activities of their operators (for example, by using Autowiki-
browser – a semi-automated MediaWiki editor13
) or to connect dif-
ferent language versions of a page through interwiki-links. The
second category comprises bots that are used to support the main-
tenance work of editors by compiling working lists or by informing
editors about existing status changes on articles. The third category
- the community focus - refers to activities that are rather unrelated
to encyclopedic articles; they are more related to community rules
and their enforcement.
Four bots have a community focus: the CopperBot, GiftBot, Items-
bot and xqbot. The CopperBot is the German equivalent to the
HagermanBot of the English Wikipedia [8] that is responsible for
signing unsigned comments on discussion pages. The main task of
the Itemsbot was welcoming new users to the German Wikipedia
by leaving a message on their personal discussion pages. Probably
because of the aforementioned community consensus against bot
welcome messages, the bot stopped working within two months.
In 2008 and 2009, the operator of the Giftbot requested a bot flag
for her bot in order to correct spelling mistakes. In both cases, the
request was denied. In July 2010, the third request was successful.
This time, the bot tasks included the removal of processed flagged
revision requests, the dissemination of a newsletter that contains
information on new edits on pages such as polls, and requests for
banning users as well. All these activities were much more fo-
cused on specific community needs. We assume that the operator
of Giftbot learned much more about existing rules and guidelines
over time and was therefore much better able to meet the needs of
her fellows.
The last of the four community bots is introduced in more detail in
the next section. We show in an exemplary way how the activity
set employed by this bot changes over time.
5.3.1 Example: xqbot
In October 2008, the editor applied for a bot flag for her xqbot in
order to request speedy deletions of orphan pages14
or remains of
moved pages. In November 2008, the bot flag was assigned and
the bot started working. Soon after this, the bot activities included
over ten different tasks such as correcting double redirects, fixing
links on disambiguation pages, adding missing references tags in
articles, and the setting of interwiki-links. All these tasks were
mainly focused on quality improvements to encyclopedic articles.
In 2010, the focus changed in terms of additional tasks. This was
motivated mainly by a procedural problem that occurred during an
administrator re-election.
In January 2010, one participant initiated a discussion by question-
ing the procedure to take care of obsolete votes [31], [32]. The
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowse
14
Orphan pages on Wikipedia are articles that have no or very few
incoming links.
Zugang
zum Internet

56. Bomis

57. Bomis

58. Comunity-
ManagerInnen?

59. Fazit
Es gibt keine grenzenlosen Organisationen
Informale Grenzen können
undurchlässiger als formale sein
Gerade Offenheit erfordert
organisationale Grenzziehung

60. Kontakt
E-Mail:
Leonhard.Dobusch@uibk.ac.at
"
Twitter:
@leonidobusch
"
Homepages:
http://bit.ly/LD_UIBK (Universität Innsbruck)
http://www.dobusch.net
"
Forschungsblog:
http://www.governancexborders.com