Carleton College

25 May 2020

Source: https://www.carleton.edu/computer-science/major/comps/

In addition to the course requirements, each major must carry out an integrative exercise (“comps”). During fall and winter or winter and spring terms of the senior year, the student will participate in a capstone project. Students will work in teams of four to seven students on a faculty-specified topic, where each team is supervised by a faculty member. Each project involves both a theoretical component (designing and validating algorithms, analyzing data) and an implementation component (developing, testing, and debugging software).

Upon conclusion of the project, each team will present its work in a colloquium, open to Carleton students, faculty, and friends and family members. In addition, each team is expected to document its work on a web site and release the finished software.

Source: http://cs.carleton.edu/cs_comps/1920/wikipedia/index.php

Exploring Wikipedia’s Response to Social Movements

Advisor: Sneha Narayan

Background

Wikipedia is one of the most important and highly accessed information repositories on the web. When we see that an event or person has an article about them on Wikipedia, they are conferred with a kind of legitimacy; in some sense, coverage on Wikipedia represents that this is a topic of collective interest that people have bothered to write about. However, the answers to questions like "what topics are worth writing Wikipedia articles about?" are not stable, and can change over time. They might reflect what Wikipedia editors care about and are paying attention to, as well as changing norms within the Wikipedia community and in society as a whole.

One particular mechanism that transforms our ideas of which topics are notable are prominent social movements. Many social movements work precisely to shape our collective notions of what issues are considered important, and seek to demonstrate that their grievances are legitimate. For example, when the Black Lives Matter movement gained steam, they sought to draw attention to instances of police officers shooting unarmed black people. The rise of this movement not only affected the extent to which police shootings were covered by news media, but also how they were covered on Wikipedia (Twyman et. al. 2017).

Since coverage on Wikipedia can be seen as a reflection of a topic’s legitimacy and influence, analyzing how a particular social movement shapes contributions to the encyclopedia can tell us a lot about whether and how that movement changes the way we collectively document ideas and events connected to their cause. It can also shed light on how editing activity on Wikipedia is shaped by current events. In this project, you will analyze how Wikipedia editing activity was affected by a social movement of your choosing by building and analyzing a large dataset of revisions made to articles connected to the movement, and tracking how editing activity on those articles changed over the course of the movement’s prominence.

The project

The inspiration for this project comes from work done in this paper, which examines how the Black Lives Matter movement affected collaboration and documentation practices on Wikipedia. Your task will be to replicate the analysis in the paper, either for Black Lives Matter, or for a different social movement of your choice (perhaps the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, or something else entirely). In particular, you will:

1. Familiarize yourself with the relevant background literature by reading the original paper and related work on online collaboration, social movements, and social computing systems
2. Determine which social movement you would like to study, whether it is Black Lives Matter or some other movement
3. Use the MediaWiki API to find all article titles related to the movement you choose to study
4. Build datasets (using the MediaWiki API) that include the revision history of all the articles you identified in the previous step
5. Analyze the datasets you built to identify how the social movement you chose to study affected collaboration and documentation practices on Wikipedia
6. Write a paper that details your findings and compares them against what was found in the original paper

References/Inspiration

Twyman, M., Keegan, B. C., & Shaw, A. (2017, February). Black Lives Matter in Wikipedia: Collective memory and collaboration around online social movements. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 1400-1412). ACM

Final Results: http://cs.carleton.edu/cs_comps/1920/wikipedia/final-results/index.html

GitHub Repository: https://github.com/gadeuneo/wiki-comps-2020