Replication Data for: Taboo and Collaborative Knowledge Production: Evidence from Wikipedia

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 information on each can be difficult to obtain. Are peer produced knowledge bases like Wikipedia a promising approach for providing people with information on taboo subjects? With its reliance on volunteers who might also be averse to taboo, can the peer production model be relied on to produce high-quality information on taboo subjects? In this paper, we seek to understand the role of taboo in volunteer-produced knowledge bases. We do so by developing a novel computational approach to identify taboo subjects and by using this method to identify a set of articles on taboo subjects in English Wikipedia. We find that articles on taboo subjects are more popular than non-taboo articles and that they are frequently subject to vandalism. Despite frequent attacks, we also find that taboo articles are higher quality. We hypothesize that societal attitudes will lead contributors to taboo subjects to seek to be less identifiable. Although our results are consistent with this proposal in several ways, we surprisingly find that contributors make themselves more identifiable in others.顾名思义，人们对禁忌话题往往讳莫如深，甚至不愿加以谈论。由于在绝大多数文化语境中，性、健康与暴力均属于禁忌议题，因此相关的重要信息往往难以获取。诸如维基百科（Wikipedia）这类用户协作生产的知识库，是否有望为大众提供禁忌话题的相关信息？既然该平台依赖的志愿者群体本身也可能抵触禁忌话题，那么这种协作生产模式能否产出高质量的禁忌议题相关信息？本研究旨在探究禁忌话题在用户协作生产的知识库中所发挥的作用。为此，我们开发了一种全新的计算方法以识别禁忌话题，并运用该方法从英文维基百科中筛选出一批涉及禁忌议题的条目。我们发现，禁忌议题条目相较于非禁忌条目更受关注，且频繁遭受恶意编辑（vandalism）。尽管频繁遭遇此类破坏，我们仍发现禁忌议题条目的整体质量更高。我们提出假设：受社会态度影响，参与禁忌议题编辑的贡献者会倾向于降低自身的可识别性。尽管我们的研究结果在多个层面契合这一假设，但我们却意外发现，贡献者反而会在其他场景中提升自身的可识别性。