Greetings and welcome to this presentation of our CSCW paper.Working for the invisible
machines or pumping information into an empty void, an exploration of Wikidata contributors'
motivations my name is Charles, I'm a PhD candidate at GroupLens, University of Minnesota.Today
I'm going to present this paper along with my coauthor, colleague Mo so here is the outline
of this presentation.So first I will give a brief introduction about Wikidata, what
it does and what's its specific characteristics, and then I will talk about the motivations
for conducting this piece of research as well as what is our approach and research methods.The
rest of this presentation will focus on one of the major findings of this project, which
is the two major archetypes we observed.Then my co author will take over and introduce
these two archetypes using more concrete examples.So, a glimpse of Wikidata.Wikidata serves as central
knowledge base for Wikimedia projects as a structured data platform it not only provide
data support for other wiki projects like Wikipedia Wikivoyage or Wikibooks, but also
it is connected to external databases like the library of Congress.The major components
of Wikidata are items and properties where real world entities like locations and humans,
and also in this figure, the example earth are represented in Wikidata as items.Their
characteristics such as the birthday of a person, the release date of the movie or album
are modeled as properties and are stored as the property value pairs in Wikidata to describe
the item.The motivation of conducting this research is
that we would like to understand different kind of work that Wikidata editors could take
on and what factors motivate them to contribute to different components of Wikidata.Specifically,
we would like to observe any patterns and findings that are correlated with structured
data, which is the unique pattern of this peer production platform.In terms of methods,
we recruited 15 Wikidata editors through project chat and editor talk page and then we conducted
one to one semi-structured interviews with them.After we get the transcripts, we analyze
the data using inductive thematic analysis.So here is our major finding about editor roles.While
we are performing the inductive thematic analysis, we observe from the data that the motivation
and work pattern start to diverge into two different archetypes.Each archetype, while
having some common characteristics, contribute differently to Wikidata, which motivated by
different reasons, we decided to name the two archetypes mason and architects, in the
sense that the architects lay out the foundation of the ontological infrastructure of Wikidata.While
architects define how things being modeled and represented in Wikidata while masons,
at the same time build the database through data entry and editing.My colleague Mo will
elaborate the two archetypes in detail using concrete examples.All right, so Charles just
introduced us to these two groups of people, architects and masons, who do completely different
types of work on Wikidata .And what I want to do is paint a picture of who some of these
people might be to get some understanding of why certain wiki data editors end up being
architects versus end up being masons.And the way I want to do this is by focusing on
two of our participants p Three, who's an architect, and P Ten, who's a mason.And these
quotes really represent a common thread or common threads that went through our interviews
with each of them.So P3 important things to know about her is she's a recent retiree who's
really engaged in her career and was really concerned that she might get bored being retired,
and that's kind of the energy that she brings to wiki data.P10, on the other hand, is a
father.
He has young children, he has a full time job and a career.Energy isn't always available
when he's doing his Wikidata editing.And so one of the ways in which this causes them
to differ is in the level of cognitive effort that they want to expand.P3 actively wants
to keep her brain engaged, wants to keep learning new things, whereas for P10, Wikidata is something
that you can just add a few bits of information to without having to think about it a lot.And
this affects, obviously, what kind of tasks they gravitate towards on the platform.Another
dimension where they differ is on preference for collaboration.P3 loves working together
with other people.This is something that she misses from her career.P10, on the other hand,
just wants a solitary activity to do.At the end of the day, he is happy to just tinker
in his own little corner and do his own little thing and actively doesn't want to engage
with the community.And finally, domain expertise.P3 is an expert on clothing and textiles, and
those are the kinds of items that she works on.And this makes sense because when you're
developing an ontological infrastructure, when you're deciding what kinds of information
to capture about the type of item you're working on, you need to have a very deep understanding
of the domain.So you need to know what information is actually important to capture about a textile
versus, say, a painting.And that's not something that you can do if you just have passing knowledge.Whereas
for masons, the tasks that they gravitate towards typically require less thought and
also require less expertise.And so even if they start in an area where they're experts.So
P10 is a biologist and he started editing items in his area of expertise, but then he
branched out and as he says, sometimes you end up just going down rabbit holes.And this
was very common amongst our masons.So one of the key similarities, these are a bunch
of ways in which they were different.One of the key similarities is that both masons and
architects really appreciated structured data.And this is no surprise because they're on Wikidata,
they're editing Wikidata as opposed to, say, Wikipedia, for example.And the reasons for
that were things like, this is just how my mind works, or I enjoy categorizing things.But
one of the key differences and one of the additional motivations for Masons was this
idea that structured data makes tasks more accomplishable, that it provides a configuration
where architects can do a lot of the intellectual kind of heavy lifting and laying the groundwork
and creating the blueprints.And Masons then get these tasks that are a lot more accomplishable,
but they're still very valuable and that contribute knowledge in ways that they think are important.And
this quote from P3 really highlights this.He says he's not motivated to start a video game
and finish it, or start a book and then finish it and beats himself up.But with tasks on
Wikidata, they're all very accomplishable.It's a task that makes me feel like I'm doing something
good.Now, we have a bunch of interesting design implications based on these findings, but
for that,I will invite you to read our paper.And if you have any questions or would you just
like to chat about our work, please feel free to reach out to Charles and or myself.And
with that, I will say thank you for watching our presentation.