Enabling Social Translucence for Wikipedia

Newcomers to online communities often have trouble understanding the context and activities of other participants. But this is not just a problem to newcomers; even established members can struggle to comprehend social dynamics in their own communities. Social translucence is a conceptual approach to designing systems that facilitate better sensemaking about others and their actions in online social settings. We have been developing a framework to facilitate socially translucent tools and extensions for distributed contributor communities such as Wikipedia. This demo presents example tools and an evolving architecture to illustrate characteristics of social translucence.