System Design for Social Translucence in Socially Mediating Technologies

Wikipedia is an example SMT where large numbers of online actions can be observed. The Wikimedia Foundation provides regular releases of the complete contents of Wikipedia. These releases include all article, user, discussion, and administrative pages, each with the complete revision history. These regular releases have made it possible for us to consider future system architectures that can assist users making observations and interpretations of others activities. Our approach takes social translucence (Erickson and Kellog 2000) as a conceptual framework to design a system infrastructure that supports a wide range of social activity inference. At a high level, a socially translucent system conveys socially salient information to participants in an online system, without inundating them with detailed low-level interaction data. Our system architecture allows community members to compose activities that they deem relevant into more general role type representations. Further, based on our approach, those compositions can be viewed and interpreted by other members of the community. In the following we describe some research results that inform one specific dimension of social translucence related to work activity in Wikipedia. We consider how dimensions of Wikipedia work could be composed into viable representations of user reputation. We then describe our proposed system infrastructure and finally close with four issues that link our empirical social study of Wikipedia with our system development agenda. 2.0 Initial Interpretation and Relative Values of Online Activity Wikipedians engage in a wide range of online activities that grow and maintain Wikipedia - both as an encyclopedia and as an online community. Understanding the range of work contributions and how Wikipedians come to understand that work is critical to the system we are developing.