skip to main content
research-article

Image Wishlist: Context and Images in Commons-Based Peer Production Communities

Published: 15 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

One promise of commons-based peer production systems is that they provide content (e.g., text, images, sounds, lines of code) for anyone to use, edit, and distribute. However, when some kinds of content are stripped of context and made available for reuse, there are several knock-on effects. In this paper, we discuss how these knock-on effects can complicate the illustration of Wikipedia's encyclopedic articles. We focus on the particularly difficult case of illustrating articles about female anatomy and women's health. Through our analysis, we demonstrate several barriers to illustrating these kinds of articles, including a lack of representative images on Wikimedia Commons, complex issues of consent, and editorial disagreements about the intended audiences for such images. We argue that these barriers are, in part, the unanticipated effects of decontextualization and subsequent recontextualization as images are removed from their original contexts and made available in Wikimedia Commons. Drawing on prior work in language acquisition and archival studies, we critique the design of commons-based peer production systems and suggest ways in which they might be re-designed to account better for the nuances of context. Finally, we raise questions about the costs of recontextualization in peer production systems in general.

References

[1]
Judd Antin and Coye Cheshire. 2010. Readers are not free-riders: Reading as a form of participation on Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 127--130.
[2]
Sanghapali Aruna. 2019. How Wikipedia cancels Dalit icons. The Asian Age. (2019, Dec 15). Retrieved from https://www.asianage.com/opinion/columnists/151219/how-wikipedia-cancels-dalit-icons.html. Accessed 13 January 2020.
[3]
Amin Azzam, David Bresler, Armando Leon, Lauren Maggio, Evans Whitaker, James Heilman, Jake Orlowitz, Valerie Swisher, Lane Rasberry, Kingsley Otoide, Fred Trotter, Will Ross, and Jack D. McCue. 2017. Why medical schools should embrace Wikipedia: Final-year medical student contributions to Wikipedia articles for academic credit at one school. Academic Medicine 92(2),194--200.
[4]
Samy A. Azer, Nourah M. AlSwaidan, Lama A. Alshwairikh, and Jumana M. AlShammari. 2015. Accuracy and readability of cardiovascular entries on Wikipedia: Are they reliable learning resources for medical students?. BMJ 5(10): e008187.
[5]
Shaowen Bardzell. 2010. Feminist HCI: Taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1301--1310. ACM, 2010.
[6]
Julie Beck. 2014. Doctor's #1 source for healthcare information: Wikipedia. The Atlantic. 2014, March 5. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/doctors-1-source-for-healthcare-information-wikipedia/284206/
[7]
Yochai Benkler. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press.
[8]
Yochai Benkler, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2015. Peer production: A form of collective intelligence. Handbook of Collective Intelligence, 175.
[9]
Glenn A. Bowen. 2009. Document analysis as a qualitative research method. Qualitative Research Journal 9(2), 27.
[10]
Alex Bowyer, Kyle Montague, Stuart Wheater, Ruth McGovern, Raghu Lingam, and Madeline Balaam. 2018. Understanding the Family Perspective on the Storage, Sharing and Handling of Family Civic Data. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 136, 1--13.
[11]
Susan L. Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman. 2005. Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In Proceedings of the 2005 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP '05). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1--10.
[12]
Boreum Choi, Kira Alexander, Robert E. Kraut, and John M. Levine. 2010. Socialization tactics in Wikipedia and their effects. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 107--116.
[13]
Juliet Corbin and Anselm Strauss. 2014. Basics of Qualitative Research: Techniques and Procedures for Developing Grounded Theory. Sage Publications.
[14]
William G. Dixon, Karen Spencer, Hawys Williams, Caroline Sanders, David Lund, Edgar A. Whitley, and Jane Kaye. 2014. A dynamic model of patient consent to sharing of medical record data. BMJ 348 (2014): g1294.
[15]
Kristofer Erickson, Felix Rodriguez Perez, and Jesus Rodriguez Perez. 2018. What is the Commons Worth?: Estimating the Value of Wikimedia Imagery by Observing Downstream Use. In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 9, 6 pages.
[16]
Sebastián Ferrada, Nicolás Bravo, Benjamin Bustos, and Aidan Hogan. 2018. Querying Wikimedia Images using Wikidata Facts. In Companion Proceedings of the The Web Conference 2018 (WWW '18). International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, Republic and Canton of Geneva, CHE, 1815--1821.
[17]
Heather Ford and Judy Wajcman. 2017. 'Anyone can edit', not everyone does: Wikipedia's infrastructure and the gender gap. Social Studies of Science, 47(4), 511--527.
[18]
Edward Galvez. 2018. What we learned from surveying 4,000 members of the Wikipedia and Wikimedia Communities. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved from https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/09/13/what-we-learned-surveying-4000-community-members/. Accessed 10 January 2020.
[19]
Robert Gehl. 2009. YouTube as archive: Who will curate this digital Wunderkammer?. International Journal of Cultural Studies 12(1), 43--60.
[20]
Sharon Hamilton-Wieler. 1988. The fallacy of decontextualization. Viewpoints. ERIC Database. 18 pages. Retrieved from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED292125.pdf
[21]
James H. Heilman, Eckhard Kemmann, Michael Bonert, Anwesh Chatterjee, Brent Ragar, Graham M. Beards, David J. Iberri et al. 2011. Wikipedia: A key tool for global public health promotion. Journal of Medical Internet Research 13, no. 1, e14.
[22]
Jerald Hughes and Karl Lang. 2006. Transmutability: Digital decontextualization, manipulation, and recontextualization as a new source of value in the production and consumption of culture products. In Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'06), vol. 8, pp. 165a-165a. IEEE, 2006.
[23]
Terry Judd and Gregor Kennedy. 2011. Expediency-based practice? Medical students' reliance on Google and Wikipedia for biomedical inquiries. British Journal of Educational Technology 42, no. 2, 351--360.
[24]
Jane Kaye, Edgar A. Whitley, David Lund, Michael Morrison, Harriet Teare, and Karen Melham. 2015. Dynamic consent: a patient interface for twenty-first century research networks. European Journal of Human Genetics 23, no. 2: 141.
[25]
Aniket Kittur, Bryan Pendleton, and Robert E. Kraut. 2009. Herding the cats: the influence of groups in coordinating peer production. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym '09). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 7, 1--9.
[26]
Igor Kopytoff. 1986. The cultural biography of things: Commoditization as a process. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspectives. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 70--73.
[27]
Gerwin Kramer, Gosse Bouma, Dennis Hendriksen, and Mathijs Homminga. 2012. Classifying image galleries into a taxonomy using metadata and Wikipedia. In International Conference on Application of Natural Language to Information Systems, pp. 191--196. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
[28]
Travis Kriplean, Ivan Beschastnikh, David W. McDonald, and Scott A. Golder. 2007. Community, consensus, coercion, control: CS*W or how policy mediates mass participation. In Proceedings of the 2007 International ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP '07). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 167--176.
[29]
Michaël R. Laurent and Tim J. Vickers. 2009. Seeking Health Information Online: Does Wikipedia Matter?. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 16.4 (2009): 471--479.
[30]
Andreas Leithner, Werner Maurer-Ertl, Mathias Glehr, Joerg Friesenbichler, Katharina Leithner, and Reinhard Windhager. 2010. Wikipedia and osteosarcoma: A trustworthy patients? information?. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association 17(4), 373--374.
[31]
Lopez, C. S., E. Krauskopf, C. E. Villota, L. O. Burzio, and J. E. Villegas. 2017. Cervical cancer, human papillomavirus and vaccines: Assessment of the information retrieved from general knowledge websites in Chile. Public Health 148, 19--24.
[32]
Jimmie Manning. 2017. In vivo coding. The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods. 1--2.
[33]
Amanda Menking, David W. McDonald, and Mark Zachry. 2017. Who Wants to Read This? A Method for Measuring Topical Representativeness in User Generated Content Systems. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2068--2081.
[34]
Amanda Menking and Ingrid Erickson. 2015. The Heart Work of Wikipedia: Gendered, Emotional Labor in the World's Largest Online Encyclopedia. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 207--210.
[35]
Amanda Menking and Jon Rosenberg. 2020. WP:NOT, WP:NPOV, and Other Stories Wikipedia Tells Us: A Feminist Critique of Wikipedia's Epistemology. Science, Technology, & Human Values.
[36]
Amanda Menking, Vaibhavi Rangarajan, and Michael Gilbert. 2018. 'Sharing small pieces of the world': Increasing and broadening participation in Wikimedia Commons. In Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration (OpenSym '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 13, 12 pages.
[37]
Sarah Mervosh. 2019, May 30. North Face Edited Wikipedia's Photos. Wikipedia Wasn't Happy. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/business/north-face-wikipedia-leo-burnett.html
[38]
Barry M. Mitnick and Robert C. Ryan. 2015. On making meanings: Curators, social assembly, and mashups. Strategic Organization 13(2), 141--152.
[39]
Jonathan T. Morgan, Robert M. Mason, and Karine Nahon. 2012. Negotiating cultural values in social media: A case study from Wikipedia. In 2012 45th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 3490--3499. IEEE.
[40]
Kevin Morris. 2013. How Wikimedia Commons became a massive amateur porn hub. (25 June, 2013). The Daily Dot. Retrieved from https://www.dailydot.com/debug/wikimedia-commons- photos-jimmy-wales-broken/
[41]
Malolan S. Rajagopalan, Vineet K. Khanna, Yaacov Leiter, Meghan Stott, Timothy N. Showalter, Adam P. Dicker, and Yaacov R. Lawrence. 2011. Patient-oriented cancer information on the internet: A comparison of Wikipedia and a professionally maintained database. Journal of Oncology Practice 7(5), 319--323.
[42]
George P. Nichols and Alison Wylie. 212. 'Do Not Do Unto Others'': Cultural misrecognition and the harms of appropriation in an open-source world. Appropriating the Past: Philosophical Perspectives on Archaeological Practice. 195--221.
[43]
Jenny Preece. 2001. Online communities: Usuability, sociability, theory and methods. Frontiers of Human-Centred Computing, Online Communities and Virtual Environments. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 263--277.
[44]
Barbara Rösch. 2014. Investigation of information behavior in Wikipedia articles. In Proceedings of the 5th Information Interaction in Context Symposium (IIiX '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 351--353.
[45]
Evan Sheehan, Chenlin Meng, Matthew Tan, Burak Uzkent, Neal Jean, Marshall Burke, David Lobell, and Stefano Ermon. 2019. Predicting Economic Development using Geolocated Wikipedia Articles. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2698--2706.
[46]
Jack Stuef. 2012. (26 March, 2012). The epic battle for Wikipedia's autofellatio page. BuzzFeed. Retrieved from https://www.buzzfeed.com/jackstuef/inside-the- seedy-world-of-wikipedia- exhibitionism?utm_term=.mhAM974RQ#.raPrw56WY
[47]
Dawn M. Szymanski, Lauren B. Moffitt, and Erika R. Carr. 2011. Sexual objectification of women: Advances to theory and research 1--7. The Counseling Psychologist 39(1), 6--38.
[48]
Ramine Tinati, Markus Luczak-Roesch, Nigel Shadbolt, and Wendy Hall. 2015. Using WikiProjects to Measure the Health of Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '15 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 369--370.
[49]
Jan E. Trost. 1986. Statistically nonrepresentative stratified sampling: A sampling technique for qualitative studies. Qualitative Sociology 9(1), 54--57.
[50]
Bert van Oers. 1998. The Fallacy of Decontextualization, Mind, Culture, and Activity, 5:2, 135--142.
[51]
Ben Vershbow and Sandra Fauconnier. 2018. How could Wikimedia Commons be improved? A conversation with designer George Oates. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved from https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/10/29/george-oates-conversation/. Accessed 13 January 2020.
[52]
Fernanda B. Viégas. 2007. The visual side of Wikipedia. In 2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07), pp. 85--85. IEEE.
[53]
Nicholas Vincent, Isaac Johnson, and Brent Hecht. 2018. Examining Wikipedia With a Broader Lens: Quantifying the Value of Wikipedia's Relationships with Other Large-Scale Online Communities. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Paper 566, 13 pages.
[54]
Hawys Williams, Karen Spencer, Caroline Sanders, David Lund, Edgar A. Whitley, Jane Kaye, and William G. Dixon. 2015. Dynamic consent: A possible solution to improve patient confidence and trust in how electronic patient records are used in medical research. JMIR Medical Informatics 3(1): e3.
[55]
Olga Zagovora, Fabian Flöck, and Claudia Wagner. 2017. ?(Weitergeleitet von Journalistin)?: The Gendered Presentation of Professions on Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Web Science Conference (WebSci '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 83--92.

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Probing Respiratory Care With Generative Deep LearningProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100997:CSCW2(1-34)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Conflicts of Control: Continuous Blood Glucose Monitoring and Coordinated Caregiving for Teenagers with Type 1 DiabetesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100977:CSCW2(1-32)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
  • (2023)Composing Team Compositions: An Examination of Instructors' Current Algorithmic Team Formation PracticesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100967:CSCW2(1-24)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
  • Show More Cited By

Index Terms

  1. Image Wishlist: Context and Images in Commons-Based Peer Production Communities

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
    Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 4, Issue CSCW2
    CSCW
    October 2020
    2310 pages
    EISSN:2573-0142
    DOI:10.1145/3430143
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 15 October 2020
    Published in PACMHCI Volume 4, Issue CSCW2

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. decontextualization
    2. images
    3. peer production
    4. recontextualization
    5. wikimedia commons
    6. wikipedia
    7. women's health

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)15
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
    Reflects downloads up to 20 Feb 2025

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all
    • (2023)Probing Respiratory Care With Generative Deep LearningProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100997:CSCW2(1-34)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Conflicts of Control: Continuous Blood Glucose Monitoring and Coordinated Caregiving for Teenagers with Type 1 DiabetesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100977:CSCW2(1-32)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Composing Team Compositions: An Examination of Instructors' Current Algorithmic Team Formation PracticesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100967:CSCW2(1-24)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Chilling Tales: Understanding the Impact of Copyright Takedowns on Transformative Content CreatorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100957:CSCW2(1-21)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
    • (2023)"Why do you need 400 photographs of 400 different Lockheed Constellation?": Value Expressions by Contributors and Users of Wikimedia CommonsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100947:CSCW2(1-34)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Assessing Human-AI Interaction Early through Factorial Surveys: A Study on the Guidelines for Human-AI InteractionACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/351160530:5(1-45)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2023
    • (2022)Unpacking Stitching between Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons: Barriers to Cross-Platform CollaborationProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35557666:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
    • (2022)Stewarding the Documental Afterlives of Refugee Tech InitiativesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35555606:CSCW2(1-23)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022

    View Options

    Login options

    Full Access

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Figures

    Tables

    Media

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media