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Make a Difference in a Different Way: Twitter Bot Creators and Wikipedia Transparency.

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Springer

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Software robots (bots) are a major part of contemporary Internet culture, employed by businesses for customer service, artists for digital expression, and ‘bad actors’ for misinformation. A recent line of Twitter bots, known as WikiEdits bots, has attempted to increase information transparency on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. This study expands on previous work on Twitter bots by investigating the motivations and experiences of the developers who created bots that monitor Wikipedia for edits made by government bodies and other primary stakeholders. Thirteen qualitative interviews were conducted with a global sample of WikiEdits contributors, revealing various opinions on the successes, shortcomings, and significance of the project. The data reveal that participants hold a high level of computer and programming literacy, and while some creators were driven by activist ideals, others used the project more as a personal technical challenge. This study contributes to CSCW’s interest in how activism is materialized, enabled, and constrained by examining the ways in which a loose network of developers with various motivations use platform affordances to highlight data transparency possibilities.

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Livingstone, Randall M. (2021): Make a Difference in a Different Way: Twitter Bot Creators and Wikipedia Transparency.. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW): Vol. 30, No. 0. DOI: 10.1007/s10606-021-09411-6. Springer. PISSN: 1573-7551. pp. 733-756

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Activism, Bots, Programmers, Qualitative interviews, Software robots, Twitter, Wikipedia

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Number of citations to item: 3

  • Dipto Das, Bryan Semaan (2022): Collaborative Identity Decolonization as Reclaiming Narrative Agency: Identity Work of Bengali Communities on Quora, In: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, doi:10.1145/3491102.3517600
  • Dipto Das, Dhwani Gandhi, Bryan Semaan (2024): Reimagining Communities through Transnational Bengali Decolonial Discourse with YouTube Content Creators, In: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction CSCW2(8), doi:10.1145/3686900
  • Nishtha Jatana, Mansehej Singh, Charu Gupta, Geetika Dhand, Shaily Malik, Pankaj Dadheech, Nagender Aneja, Sandhya Aneja (2024): Differentially processed optimized collaborative rich text editor, In: Multimedia Tools and Applications, doi:10.1007/s11042-024-19734-3
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