Life Histories of Taboo Knowledge Artifacts

TL;DR

Taboo topics such as sexuality and health pose censorship risks in public knowledge work. The paper combines qualitative life-history narratives and quantitative time-series analysis of four Wikipedia articles (two taboo, two non-taboo) to uncover how public knowledge artifacts develop under controversial conditions. It identifies six interrelated conditions and processes—resilient leadership, organizational support, limited identifiability, disjointed sensemaking, emergent governance, and imagined public audiences—that jointly enable or hinder development, with practical implications for supporting contributors and governance structures. The study highlights design considerations for knowledge bases to better accommodate vulnerable topics, including contributor protection, governance, and clear pathways for high-quality sourcing. Overall, the work offers a detailed, data-driven view of how taboo articles come to high quality in a large-scale, hostile online environment, informing improvements in public knowledge work platforms.

Abstract

Communicating about some vital topics -- such as sexuality and health -- is treated as taboo and subjected to censorship. How can we construct knowledge about these topics? Wikipedia is home to numerous high-quality knowledge artifacts about taboo topics like sexual organs and human reproduction. How did these artifacts come into being? How is their existence sustained? This mixed-methods comparative project builds on previous work on taboo topics in Wikipedia and draws from qualitative and quantitative approaches. We follow a sequential complementary design, developing a narrative articulation of the life of taboo articles, comparing them to nontaboo articles, and examining some of their quantifiable traits. We find that taboo knowledge artifacts develop through multiple successful collaboration styles and, unsurprisingly, that taboo subjects are the sites of conflict. We identify and describe six themes in the development of taboo knowledge artifacts. These artifacts need <i>resilient leadership</i> and <i>engaged organizations</i> to thrive under conditions of <i>limited identifiability</i> and <i>disjointed sensemaking</i>, while contributors simultaneously engage in <i>emergent governance</i> and <i>imagining public audiences</i>. Our observations have important implications for supporting public knowledge work on controversial subjects such as taboos and more generally.

Figures (3)

• Figure 1: The interface provided by Wikipedia for stepping through the publicly recorded revision history of an article. This screenshot depicts what we call the true birth of Menstruation, in which a large amount of text was brought in from Menstrual cycle and Menstruation becomes readable as a standalone artifact, rather than simply serving as a redirect to another article. We obscure contributor names.
• Figure 2: Article revision quality over time. Extreme dips reflect periods of frequent vandalism.
• Figure 3: Frequency of varying revision counts among contributors to the article, not including reverted revisions or revisions that themselves are only a revert (typically vandalism and vandalism removal, but sometimes edit wars); note the log scale on both axes.