Wikimania 2023 lightning talk on taboo articles in Wikipedia: transcript

Key points

• Taboo topics are ones people are reluctant to discuss, yet they cover important areas like mental health, physical health, violence and sexuality.
• To avoid relying on personal judgment, the researcher identified taboo articles by looking for euphemisms, using Wiktionary as the data source.
• Taboo articles are popular with readers and also popular to contribute to, so editors do not shy away from them.
• Taboo articles get more low-quality edits and vandalism, but Wikipedia removes it quickly.
• Quality of taboo articles was found to be great compared with other articles, contrary to the expectation that sources would be lacking.
• Contributors are less likely to have accounts, but those with accounts are more likely to have user pages, reveal gender and be emailable.

Chapters

1. 0:00Introduction to the taboo research project
2. 0:32What taboo means and why euphemisms were used
3. 2:07Research question and five hypotheses
4. 3:00Popularity, vandalism and quality of taboo articles
5. 4:59Contributor identity and overall takeaway

Full transcript

0:00So without much ado, I'd like to also invite the next speaker. Hey, Wikimania. I am so excited to be here. I'm Kaylee Champion. I'm going to tell you about a research project I've been working on with Benjamin Mako Hill about taboo subjects in Wikipedia. Awesome. So when I say that I study taboo, something that people often will ask me is how do you identify what's taboo?

0:32what does taboo even mean and isn't that just subjective so taboo are those topics that by definition we're reluctant to talk about they're yucky they pollute us to think of them to talk about them they're forbidden in some way but a lot of the subjects that are taboo in our cultures and our religions are also important for us to understand they have to do with mental health health, with physical, personal health, with violence, with sexuality. These are things that we need to know about. So how does Wikipedia respond to this? That was the sort of focus of our research question. But to identify taboo without kind of relying on my personal sense of what's taboo and what's not, I took an approach of looking for euphemisms. So why did I look at euphemisms? What is a euphemism?

1:22We come up with euphemisms as ways to talk around a taboo subject. We can think of this as a way to avoid being polluted by the sort of dirty thing that we're actually talking about. So we might say someone has passed on because it's taboo to speak too directly that they've died. A number of different taboos also are reflected in sexuality, and we have all kinds of euphemisms about sexuality. This is an example. I took my data set from Wiktionary, actually, so this is from Wiktionary, and here's the word member, which has lots of meanings, but one of those meanings is euphemistic and refers to the penis, another sort of taboo subject perhaps to speak about.

2:07so i use this to identify all kinds of articles that are about taboo subjects and here's some examples of articles that i identified that way and i think that has some um kind of familiarity although we might not have picked all of those out of the out of our own brains we can sort of see how this use of euphemisms might help us to avoid talking directly about a subject that feels taboo. So we have all of these taboo articles. We recognize that they're important. But my question was, how does Wikipedia deal with social taboo? Are Wikipedians able to overcome taboo and make great articles on taboo subjects? Or do they struggle because of, say, lack of available resources? Books get banned. Topics are uncomfortable to read about. Maybe it's just not fun to write those articles.

3:00So to test some of this tension between the desire to make knowledge freely available to everyone and this social kind of reluctance or lack of sources, I tried testing five different ideas, and I'm so excited to tell you that I was wrong in several important ways. So taboo articles, as you might guess, very popular with the general public. So I got that one right. taboo articles however that doesn't seem to keep people from making contributions to them they are quite popular to contribute to so wikipedians get out there and interact with taboo subjects instead of shying away from them i also proposed that probably taboo articles might receive kind of lower quality contributions more likely to be reverted as vandalism or just overall get removed.

3:55And that is indeed the case. We can imagine how much fun it is to vandalize. If you're a vandal, you might have all kinds of ideas about what to write all over some of these taboo topics, which is too bad. But Wikipedia removes that vandalism very quickly. um fourth thing that i went out there to test one minute that taboo articles might be lower quality the sources just might not be there and it turns out that i was wrong the quality of taboo articles when we compare to the other kinds of articles that show up in wiktionary definitions taboo articles tend to be great quality people are working really hard to make amazing quality articles out there and the fifth idea that i stepped out there to test is that uh article contributors i thought would try to kind of protect their identity make themselves less identifiable and i was right in some ways but wrong in some others that are pretty important so let me tell you more about that so contributors to taboo articles less likely to have accounts tend to have less experience

4:59even when we control for page protection on those articles. But those who do have accounts are more likely to have user pages than the average, they're more likely to reveal their gender than the average, and they're more likely to make themselves emailable than the average. So these are explicit steps that folks have taken that actually make themselves more identifiable to others. As they're contributing to these taboo articles. Alright, so the overall takeaway that I'm excited to share with you is that Wikipedians are very successful at spreading knowledge about taboo subjects.

5:37Despite the sort of social reluctance that might have intervened, instead, folks are overcoming that and making these great quality articles. That was also an interesting and educative session. i think beyond this session we need to look forward to ask i mean to look for the answer to the question how is wikipedia dealing with articles around

Source and licence

Recording: File:Wikimania 2023 - Plenary - 18 August - Lightning Talk - Taboo Articles.webm by Wikimania 2023 (2023-08-18), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.