5 papers
Taboo and Collaborative Knowledge Production: Evidence from Wikipedia
Kaylea Champion, Benjamin Mako Hill
By definition, people are reticent or even unwilling to talk about taboo subjects. Because subjects like sexuality, health, and violence are taboo in most cultures, important infor…
How Interest-Driven Content Creation Shapes Opportunities for Informal Learning in Scratch: A Case Study on Novices' Use of Data Structures
Ruijia Cheng, Sayamindu Dasgupta, Benjamin Mako Hill
Through a mixed-method analysis of data from Scratch, we examine how novices learn to program with simple data structures by using community-produced learning resources. First, we…
From Hanging Out to Figuring It Out: Socializing Online as a Pathway to Computational Thinking
Samantha Shorey, Benjamin Mako Hill, Samuel C. Woolley
Although socializing is a powerful driver of youth engagement online, platforms struggle to leverage engagement to promote learning. We seek to understand this dynamic using a mult…
The Most Important Laboratory for Social Scientific and Computing Research in History
Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Shaw
Wikipedia's founders could not have dreamed they were creating the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history but that is exactly what happen…
Effects of algorithmic flagging on fairness: quasi-experimental evidence from Wikipedia
Nathan TeBlunthuis, Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Halfaker
Online community moderators often rely on social signals such as whether or not a user has an account or a profile page as clues that users may cause problems. Reliance on these cl…