Beyond opening up the black box: Investigating the role of algorithmic systems in Wikipedian organizational culture

Abstract

Scholars and practitioners across domains are increasingly concerned with algorithmic transparency and opacity, interrogating the values and assumptions embedded in automated, black-boxed systems, particularly in user-generated content platforms. I report from an ethnography of infrastructure in Wikipedia to discuss an often understudied aspect of this topic: the local, contextual, learned expertise involved in participating in a highly automated social–technical environment. Today, the organizational culture of Wikipedia is deeply intertwined with various data-driven algorithmic systems, which Wikipedians rely on to help manage and govern the “anyone can edit” encyclopedia at a massive scale. These bots, scripts, tools, plugins, and dashboards make Wikipedia more efficient for those who know how to work with them, but like all organizational culture, newcomers must learn them if they want to fully participate. I illustrate how cultural and organizational expertise is enacted around algorithmic agents by discussing two autoethnographic vignettes, which relate my personal experience as a veteran in Wikipedia. I present thick descriptions of how governance and gatekeeping practices are articulated through and in alignment with these automated infrastructures. Over the past 15 years, Wikipedian veterans and administrators have made specific decisions to support administrative and editorial workflows with automation in particular ways and not others. I use these cases of Wikipedia’s bot-supported bureaucracy to discuss several issues in the fields of critical algorithms studies; critical data studies; and fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning—most principally arguing that scholarship and practice must go beyond trying to “open up the black box” of such systems and also examine sociocultural processes like newcomer socialization.

How should we theorize algorithms? Five ideal types in analyzing algorithmic normativities

“…Sometimes in critical algorithm studies, this challenge-to stay above the hood in our playful metaphor-is expressed as going 'beyond opening the black box' to study practice and culture (cf. Geiger, 2017). From an ANT perspective, this interpretation of the black box metaphor is misplaced.…”

Seeing like a State, Enacting like an Algorithm: (Re)assembling Contact Tracing and Risk Assessment during the Covid-19 Pandemic

“…However, opening the blackbox of the algorithms is not enough. As a growing number of scholars emphasize, blackbox-focused studies highlight the technical and design parts of the algorithm yet leave them decontextualized (Christin 2020;Geiger 2017). Algorithms do not function simply based on the codes that articulate steps to deal with the input and produce output.…”

“…At both ends, algorithms enroll human and non-human actors into its own assemblage to enable surveillance, a process Christin (2020) called algorithmic enrollment. Algorithms only function in a suitable environment that is organized and supported by intensive yet often invisible works and infrastructures (Geiger 2017;Star 1990). These enrollments and assemblings are not uninterrupted projections of an algorithm design, but a process that always involves disassembling and reassembling and produces what Christin (2020) theorizes as algorithmic refraction.…”

Writing Sound: Stenography, Writing Technology, and National Modernity in China, 1890s

“…The discussion on the human‐machine interaction exemplified in the case of Chinese stenography in the 1890s also participates in the broader discussion of the tension between subjects’ embodied experience and the disembodying effects of technology in studies of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithmic composition, and digital humanities (Wilf ; Geiger ; Liu 2010). The significance of embodied experience as a mediator and material foundation for achieving information transitions across semiotic forms in cybernetics and information technologies has begun to draw the attention of more scholars; ethnographic researches exploring the disembodying connotation in technological devices provide new scope and challenge the absolute smoothness of information transmission in automatic technical environments by looking at local and contextual experience, mistakes, and noises.…”