 So without much ado, I would like to also invite the next speaker Hey, what come in here? I am so excited to be here. I'm Kayleigh champion. I'm gonna tell you about a research project I've been working on with Benjamin Mako Hill about Taboo subjects in Wikipedia Awesome, so when I say that I study taboo Something that people often will ask me is how do you identify what's taboo? What does taboo even mean and isn't that just subjective? So taboo are those topics that by definition we're reluctant to talk about. They're yucky They pollute us to think of them to talk about them. They're forbidden in some way But a lot of the subjects that are taboo in our cultures and our religions are Also important for us to understand they have to do with mental health with physical personal health with violence with Sexuality these are things that we need to know about so how does Wikipedia respond to this? That was the sort of focus of our research question But to identify taboo without kind of relying on my personal sense of what's taboo and what's not I Took an approach of looking for euphemisms. So why did I look at euphemisms? What is a euphemism? We come up with euphemisms as ways to talk around a taboo subject We can think of this as a way to avoid being polluted by the sort of dirty thing that we're actually talking about So we might say someone has passed on because it's taboo to speak too directly that they've died a number of different taboos also are Reflected in sexuality and we have all kinds of euphemisms about sexuality. This is an example I took my data set from Wiktionary actually so this is from Wiktionary and here's the word member Which has lots of meanings, but one of those meanings is euphemistic and refers to the penis Another sort of taboo subject perhaps to speak about So I use this to identify all kinds of articles that are About taboo subjects and here's some examples of articles that I identified that way and I think that has some Kind of familiarity although we might not have picked all of those out of the out of our own brains We can sort of see how This use of euphemisms might help us to avoid talking directly about a subject that feels taboo So we have all of these taboo articles. We recognize that they're important But my question was How does wikipedia deal with social taboo? Are wikipedia is able to overcome taboo and make great articles on taboo subjects? Or do they struggle because of say lack of available resources? Books get banned Topics are uncomfortable to read about. Maybe it's just not fun to write those articles So to test some of this tension between the desire to make knowledge freely available to everyone And this social kind of reluctance or lack of sources I tried testing five different ideas And i'm so excited to tell you that I was wrong in several important ways So taboo articles as you might guess very popular with the general public. So I got that one right Taboo articles. However, uh, that doesn't seem to keep people from making contributions to them They're quite popular to contribute to so wikipedia's get out there and interact with taboo subjects Instead of shying away from them I also proposed that probably taboo articles might receive kind of lower quality contributions More likely to be reverted as vandalism or just overall Get removed and that is indeed the case. We can imagine how much fun it is to vandalize If you're a vandal, you might have all kinds of ideas about what to write all over some of these taboo topics, which is too bad But wikipedia removes that vandalism very quickly Fourth thing that I went out there to test is that taboo articles might be lower quality The sources just might not be there. Uh, and it turns out that I was wrong The quality of taboo articles when we compare to the other kinds of articles that show up in Wiktionary definitions, taboo articles tend to be great quality People are working really hard to make amazing quality articles out there And the fifth idea that I stepped out there to test is that uh, article contributors I thought would try to kind of protect their identity make themselves less less Identifiable and I was right in some ways, but wrong in some others that are pretty important So let me tell you more about that. So contributors to taboo articles less likely to have accounts tend to have less experience even when we control for page protection on those articles But those who do have accounts are more likely to have user pages than the average They're more likely to reveal their gender Than the average and they're more likely to make themselves emailable than the average So these are explicit steps that folks have taken that actually make themselves more identifiable to others As they're contributing to these taboo articles All right, so the overall takeaway that I'm excited to share with you is that Wikipedia's are very successful at spreading knowledge about taboo subjects Despite the sort of social Reluctance that might have intervened Instead folks are overcoming that and making these great quality articles. This is That was also an interesting and educative session I think beyond this session we need to look forward to ask I mean to look for the answer to the question How is wikipedia dealing with articles around taboo?