What’s Mine is Mine: Territoriality in Collaborative Authoring Jennifer Thom-Santelli, Dan Cosley and Geri Gay HCI Group, Cornell Information Science 301 College Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14850, USA jt17 | drc40 | gkg1 at cornell.edu ABSTRACT Territoriality, the expression of ownership towards an object, can emerge when social actors occupy a shared social space. In the case of Wikipedia, the prevailing cultural norm is one that warns against ownership of one’s work. However, we observe the emergence of territoriality in online space with respect to a subset of articles that have been tagged with the Maintained template through a qualitative study of 15 editors who have self-designated as Maintainers. Our participants communicated ownership, demarcated boundaries and asserted their control over artifacts for the sake of quality by appropriating existing features of Wikipedia. We then suggest design strategies to support these behaviors in the proper context within collaborative authoring systems more generally. Author Keywords Territoriality, ownership, collaboration, Wikipedia, authorship ACM Classification Keywords H5.3. Group and Organizational Interfaces INTRODUCTION In an online community, issues relating to control and possession can arise when social actors inhabit a shared space. As a result, territoriality, the expression of ownership toward an object, is likely to emerge as community members work together to accomplish a common goal [4]. Territoriality serves a communicative function by signaling to other actors in the space that there is an individual or group that has taken ownership of a given territory or object (e.g “This is my space, not yours.”) These signals can shape interaction within a space through the demarcation of the boundaries between social actors in the environment [4]. The basic expression of territoriality is marking, the placement of an object or substance into a space to indicate ownership of one’s territory [4]. Territoriality can also be expressed through defense, actions that serve as a response to a perceived invasion of an established territory [4]. These behaviors, if left unchecked, may deter cooperation due to turf wars and conflicts over ownership. Various measures, such as explicit policy and community norms, are employed to prevent the expressions of such behaviors in distributed collaborative communities, particularly those in which an egalitarian model of leadership is prevalent [9]. However, we propose that at least sometimes, appropriate expressions of territoriality will have a beneficial effect on collaborative processes. Without a certain level of proprietary attachment to the community and its activities, individual commitment may wane [10], resulting in lower quality contributions or lower levels of community involvement. Creative collaborative activities, such as writing and animation filmmaking [9], also sometimes benefit from having a primary contributor. In this paper, we present the results of a qualitative study exploring the expression of territoriality online, using Wikipedia as an example. We describe how a group of lead users express territoriality in this space by appropriating existing functionality to exert control over artifacts. This extends the findings of [4] and [11] by providing one of the first empirical observations of territorial behavior in a real online community. We also examine the tradeoffs that territorial behavior raises in Wikipedia and offer implications for the design of collaborative authoring environments in general. Ownership and Coordination in Wikipedia The control of one’s text is an issue that is central to the culture that has been established within Wikipedia. Official policies discourage Wikipedia editors from feelings of ownership toward articles, in terms of the text and the ideas communicated [1], and specifically point out that being a primary contributor is not grounds for asserting possession of an article. Despite this, Wikipedia has created the Maintained template (Fig. 1), which allows editors to indicate active contributor status toward a given article. The stated guidelines, and the template itself, are careful to emphasize that article ownership is not expressed by the Maintained template (Figure 1). Maintainers are self- designated and ideally should have expertise on the subject matter as well as the structure of the article itself (e.g. style Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CHI 2009, April 4–9, 2009, Boston, MA, USA. Copyright 2009 ACM 978-1-60558-246-7/09/04…$5.00.