Social.Wiki: A Web Held in Common

How to build a Wikipedia article from zero and not die during the process? A situated experience

The Wikiconf, or Wiki Day, has become a very special day for the Wikimedia community in Colombia. It is an opportunity for those of us who, behind a username, support the construction of free knowledge in our country to meet in person. This year was a very special edition, in which I decided to share my experience of writing Wikipedia articles, in response to the constant question: Why write for Wikipedia? What do you gain from it? I decided to take the question seriously and answer it publicly in a talk. It is essential to start with an encyclopedic overview of the topic you want to write about, which means that there are sufficient secondary sources and that the person or event has some recognition; write neutrally and, most importantly, seek help from the Wikimedia community if you need it. In my experience, I have written only 9 articles, but I have written multiple drafts on topics that interest me. Libardomm shared his experience of writing an article about his municipality, Turbana, Bolívar, in which he included his friends and family; in other words, knowledge as a collective construction. Finally, the big conclusion about the question is that we all have a connection or affection for all the articles, which is why we value and enjoy their creation not only as a product, but above all as a process in which we learn and contribute to knowledge. That is part of what drives us forward, as a Wikimedia community.

Hate speech on Twitter: Profiling users and interaction analysis in the Spanish language

User Generated Content: An Influencer in Decision Making for Online Shoppers / Online Shopping

#Fracking: Tracing Climate Change Disinformation on Social Media

Wikimedia platforms are not isolated entities, nor are editors, readers, or volunteers around the world. As a community, we are connected by our shared commitment to free access to technology and knowledge. However, societies are evolving alongside other digital platforms, and leveraging this momentum will help us understand our role in the digital world. In this context, disinformation has become a global, political, and cultural phenomenon. In collaboration with Wikimedia Colombia, I carried out a project investigating how climate change disinformation and denialism manifest and circulate on social media. Our starting point was to understand the phenomenon, identify gaps across platforms, and ask what new insights could be generated and what new actions could be taken. In this project, I applied digital methods to study the case of #Fracking on X (formerly Twitter). We found that climate change disinformation primarily circulates through hashtag chains (ranging from political to generic), intensifies during real-time events (such as news coverage or electoral debates), and reinforces a form of nationalism grounded in energy autonomy. The results of my research aim to contribute to the community in two ways: by encouraging efforts to combat disinformation that go beyond content analysis and instead examine strategies of dissemination and activation. Second, by ensuring that once we understand, analyze, document, and enrich platforms with this knowledge, we are equipped to design productive, efficient, and impactful strategies to counter and prevent this phenomenon.

DAIEM: Decolonizing Algorithm's Role as a Team-member in Informal E-market

In Bangladesh’s rapidly expanding informal e-market, small-scale sellers use social media platforms like Facebook to run businesses outside formal infrastructures. These sellers rely heavily on platform algorithms—not just for visibility, but as active collaborators in business operations. Drawing on 41 in-depth interviews with sellers, buyers, and stakeholders, this paper examines how people in informal e-market perceive and interact with the algorithm as a “team member" that performs sales, marketing, and customer engagement tasks. We found that while sellers and local tech entrepreneurs are intrigued to develop services to support this industry, buyers and investors of the industry put their greater trust in human interactions. This surfaces a postcolonial tension associated with cultural values, local tech education and training, and a mismatch between the global and Bangladeshi e-markets’ growth. We expand this discussion from multiple ongoing HCI, political design, and AI design angles. We also address the postcolonial tension and support the decoloniality movement in informal e-markets by proposing the DAIEM framework that consists of six components: autonomy and agency; resistance; locality, culture, and history; rationality; materiality; and advocacy. Supporting the decoloniality and informality sentiment in informal e-market and other similar sectors, DAIEM will serve both as a guideline for algorithm design and as an analytical tool.

From users to co-creators: How social trading platforms facilitate retail investor and trader engagement

This article examines how social trading platforms encourage laypeople to become active investors and traders and to deepen their engagement over time. Extending prior research highlighting the role of cultural narratives and platform design, we show how platforms steer users along engagement pathways, transitioning novices into active investors and traders, and ultimately into co-creators, who act as finfluencers and/or provide quasi-fund management. Using a walkthrough method on two major platforms, eToro and Binance, we identify five key elements that shape these pathways: (1) the educational ‘Academy’, which establishes a market ontology; (2) monetary reward systems, which define valued activities; (3) user profile designs, which script specific roles; (4) social reward systems, which guide interactions; and (5) social feed algorithms, which curate user experience. Our comparative analysis shows how these elements are strategically aligned to steer users towards two distinct subjectivities. eToro cultivates an ‘investing-oriented’ pathway focused on building trust for its copy trading feature, while Binance fosters a ‘trading-oriented’ pathway centred on generating content and attention. Our findings contribute to the sociology of finance by detailing the socio-material mechanisms that create and sustain lay investor engagement, and to the literature on consumer co-creation by showing how platforms systematically configure users into valuable producers.