Research has shown the importance of a functioning governance system for the success of peer production communities. It particu- larly highlights the role of human coordination and communication within the governance regime. In this article, we extend this line of research by differentiating two categories of governance mech- anisms. The first category is based primarily on communication, in which social norms emerge that are often formalized by written rules and guidelines. The second category refers to the technical infrastructure that enables users to access artifacts, and that allows the community to communicate and coordinate their collective ac- tions to create those artifacts. We collected qualitative and quan- titative data from Wikipedia in order to show how a community’s consensus gradually converts social mechanisms into algorithmic mechanisms. In detail, we analyze algorithmic governance mech- anisms in two embedded cases: the software extension “flagged revisions” and the bot “xqbot”. Our insights point towards a grow- ing relevance of algorithmic governance in the realm of governing large-scale peer production communities. This extends previous re- search, in which algorithmic governance is almost absent. Further research is needed to unfold, understand, and also modify exist- ing interdependencies between social and algorithmic governance mechanisms.

1. Claudia Müller-Birn1• Leonhard Dobusch1 • James D. Herbsleb2
1 Freie Universität Berlin, 2 Carnegie Mellon University
International Conference on Communities and Technologies 2013
July 2nd 2013, Munich (Germany)
Work-to-Rule:
The Emergence of Algorithmic Governance
in Wikipedia

2. Picture: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikimedia_Foundation_Sue_Gardner_Sept_2010.jpg
Quote: http://soc.li/uhtOs4Y
Data: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Wikimedia_Growth
January 15th, 2013: 12th anniversary of Wikipedia
“The more eyes on an article,
the better it is. That is the
fundamental premise of
Wikipedia, and it explains why
Wikipedia works.”
“More than 1.5 million people
in almost every country have
contributed to Wikipedia’s 23
million articles.”

3. Aniket Kittur, Bongwon Suh, Bryan A. Pendleton, and Ed H. Chi. 2007. He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on
Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 453-462.

4. Brian Butler, Elisabeth Joyce, and Jacqueline Pike. 2008. Don't look now, but we've created a
bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA,
1101-1110.
“the “policyless” ideal that wikis represent is a pipedream”

5. Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

6. Flagged Revisions
Extension
« not registered »
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

7. Flagged Revisions
Extension
• Not registered editors can only indirectly check their contributions.
• The semi-manual system of detecting malicious contributions has been
replaced by an automated workflow.
• Positive faith has been replaced by a negative one.
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

8. German Wikipedia
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

9. German Wikipedia
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

10. Flagged Revisions
Extension
• Bots are autonomous software programs that make edits based on
predefined rules
• Bots help their operators to carry out “mindless, boring and often
reoccurring tasks”
• Bots belong to a special user group with special user rights
• Bots should avoid editing activities outside the article namespace
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

11. Flagged Revisions
Extension
0
1,000,000
2,000,000
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
boteditcountperyear
Category
Main
Other
Portal
Talk
User
User talk
Wikipedia
editing activities
includes additional
namespaces
editing activities extends
to community space
focus expands further
to project spaces about 45 %
of all edits
are outside
of article
namespace
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

12. check syntax
edit language
add template
update template
add data
update data
archive article
check for spam
set interwiki-link
create content list
link disambiguation
inter-bot-cooperation
create to-do list
send to-do alert
compile statistic
enforce rule
welcome user
support election
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

13. • Content-oriented focus
• Almost 97% of all analyzed bots take over tasks in this area
check syntax
edit language
add template
update template
add data
update data
archive article
check for spam
set interwiki-link
create content list
link disambiguation
inter-bot-cooperation
create to-do list
send to-do alert
compile statistic
enforce rule
welcome user
support election
Cl. Müller-Birn Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)

14. check syntax
edit language
add template
update template
add data
update data
archive article
check for spam
set interwiki-link
create content list
link disambiguation
inter-bot-cooperation
create to-do list
send to-do alert
compile statistic
enforce rule
welcome user
support election
• Task-oriented focus
• 6% of all analyzed bots take over tasks in this area Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

15. check syntax
edit language
add template
update template
add data
update data
archive article
check for spam
set interwiki-link
create content list
link disambiguation
inter-bot-cooperation
create to-do list
send to-do alert
compile statistic
enforce rule
welcome user
support election
• Community-oriented focus
• 1% of all analyzed bots take over tasks in this area Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

16. What is the guideline about?
“Hi, let’s talk about something different -
expired votes: How should we deal with
them? My vote has been crossed out and I
do not agree with this.”
• An administrator is automatically re-elected if users with voting rights
support this re-election request.
• Either 25 votes within one month or 50 within six months are needed.
• Votes are only valid if they are submitted (by signing a page) in one of the
two possible periods of time .
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

17. “This would be a nice job for a bot.”
“I created a bot request and
ask for feasibility”
• The final community consensus was to delete these obsolete votes and
one bot operator agreed to incorporate this task into her software.
• The requirements of how to implement the bot have not been discussed -
the bot operator just “extended” an existing program.
• A rule is algorithmically translated but its realization is invisible because
the source code is not publicly available.
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

18. 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Community
0
85
Content
0
7,200
Task
0
340
xqbot’s extending activity focus over time
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

19. • Software features and bots make guidelines and
rules part of the infrastructure and to a certain
extent, makes them harder to change and easier to
enforce.
• The conversion of socially developed rules into
algorithmic ones makes these rules less
transparent.
• Algorithmically translated rules are more scalable
but they do not handle exceptions well.
• The extent and kind of algorithmic governance
depends on the cultural background of a
community.
Let’s summaries
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

20. How can we proceed with these insights?
• We might elaborate more on what rules and guidelines
can and should be translated into the technical
infrastructure in order to help the community to make
this decision.
• We might investigate existing cultural differences in
adapting algorithmic governance mechanisms.
• We might design new features that make the algorithms
in the source code visible and understandable by non-
programmers.
Cl. Müller-Birn (CC BY-SA 3.0)

21. Aaron Halfaker, R. Stuart Gieger, Jonathan Morgan & John Riedl. (2013). The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia's reaction to
sudden popularity is causing its decline. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(5), 664-688.
One example for stepping in the right direction

22. "http://www.flickr.com/photos/racatumba/93569705/
Thank you for your attention.
Questions?