Authors: Stephanie Gokhman, David W. McDonald and Mark Zachry.

Abstract: Whether novice or expert, it is useful for contributors to understand the environment to which they are contributing, including the relationships of other users to the content and to users. However, the relationships and work that enable content creation in an online contributor system, such as Wikipedia, are not always visible. To expose and better understand these relationships, we have built an information visualization toolkit called Re:Flex to support components of social translucence in Wikipedia, with broad applicability to other contributor systems. By mimicking the flexible, fluid architecture of a wiki within the blackboard architecture of this visualization toolkit, we demonstrate how the composable interactions inherent to contributor systems can be mirrored in the tools that support the work which creates them.

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