By definition, people are reticent or even unwilling to talk about taboo subjects. Because subjects like sexuality, health, and violence are taboo in most cultures, important information on each of these subjects can be difficult to obtain. Are peer produced knowledge bases like Wikipedia a promising approach for providing people with information on taboo subjects? With its reliance on volunteers who might also be averse to taboo, can the peer production model produce high-quality information on taboo subjects? In this paper, we seek to understand the role of taboo in knowledge bases produced by volunteers. We do so by developing a novel computational approach to identify taboo subjects and by using this method to identify a set of articles on taboo subjects in English Wikipedia. We find that articles on taboo subjects are more popular than non-taboo articles and that they are frequently vandalized. Despite frequent vandalism attacks, we also find that taboo articles are higher quality than non-taboo articles. We hypothesize that stigmatizing societal attitudes will lead contributors to taboo subjects to seek to be less identifiable. Although our results are consistent with this proposal in several ways, we surprisingly find that contributors make themselves more identifiable in others.

翻译：根据定义，人们对禁忌话题往往保持沉默甚至不愿谈论。由于性、健康、暴力等主题在多数文化中均属禁忌领域，获取这些主题的重要信息可能较为困难。像维基百科这样的同行生产知识库，是否为人们获取禁忌主题信息提供了可行途径？依赖同样可能回避禁忌的志愿者，这种同行生产模式能否产出高质量的禁忌主题信息？本文旨在探究禁忌在志愿者生产的知识库中所扮演的角色。我们通过开发一种新颖的计算方法来识别禁忌主题，并运用该方法在英文维基百科中识别出一系列禁忌主题文章。研究发现：禁忌主题文章比非禁忌文章更受欢迎，且更频繁遭到破坏性编辑。尽管频繁遭受破坏，禁忌文章的质量反而高于非禁忌文章。我们假设，社会污名化态度会导致禁忌主题贡献者倾向于降低自身可识别性。虽然研究结果在多方面支持该假设，但令人意外的是，我们发现贡献者在某些方面反而提高了自身可识别性。