Life Histories of Taboo Knowledge Artifacts
Communicating about some vital topics -- such as sexuality and health -- is treated as taboo and subjected to censorship. How can we construct knowledge about these topics? Wikipedia is home to numerous high-quality knowledge artifacts about taboo topics like sexual organs and human reproduction. Ho...
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Main Authors | , |
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Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
28.08.2024
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | Communicating about some vital topics -- such as sexuality and health -- is
treated as taboo and subjected to censorship. How can we construct knowledge
about these topics? Wikipedia is home to numerous high-quality knowledge
artifacts about taboo topics like sexual organs and human reproduction. How did
these artifacts come into being? How is their existence sustained? This
mixed-methods comparative project builds on previous work on taboo topics in
Wikipedia and draws from qualitative and quantitative approaches. We follow a
sequential complementary design, developing a narrative articulation of the
life of taboo articles, comparing them to nontaboo articles, and examining some
of their quantifiable traits. We find that taboo knowledge artifacts develop
through multiple successful collaboration styles and, unsurprisingly, that
taboo subjects are the sites of conflict. We identify and describe six themes
in the development of taboo knowledge artifacts. These artifacts need
resilient leadership and engaged organizations to thrive under
conditions of limited identifiability and disjointed sensemaking,
while contributors simultaneously engage in emergent governance and
imagining public audiences. Our observations have important implications
for supporting public knowledge work on controversial subjects such as taboos
and more generally. |
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DOI: | 10.48550/arxiv.2408.16099 |