Community Notes (formerly known as Birdwatch) is the first large-scale crowdsourced content moderation initiative launched by X (formerly Twitter) in January 2021. As the Community Notes model gains momentum across other social media platforms, there is a growing need to assess its underlying dynamics and effectiveness. This paper provides a descriptive investigation of Community Notes during its first four years, examining its linguistic diversity, sourcing practices, Contributor activity, rating behaviour, and interaction networks. In addition, we release a curated dataset and accompanying source code to support future research, along with a review of prior research on Community Notes. We parsed Notes and ratings data from the first four years of the program and conducted language detection across all Notes. For English-language Notes, we extracted embedded URLs and identified discussion topics in each Note. Additionally, we constructed monthly interaction networks among the Contributors. Together, the descriptive analysis, dataset, code, and literature review provide a foundation for advancing research on Community Notes and community-based content moderation more broadly.

翻译：Community Notes（原名Birdwatch）是X（原Twitter）于2021年1月推出的首个大规模众包内容审核倡议。随着Community Notes模型在其他社交媒体平台上的推广，亟需评估其潜在机制与有效性。本文对Community Notes前四年发展历程进行了描述性研究，考察了其语言多样性、信息来源实践、贡献者活跃度、评分行为及交互网络。同时，我们发布了一套精心整理的数据集及配套源代码以支持未来研究，并梳理了Community Notes的既有文献。我们解析了该项目前四年的笔记与评分数据，对所有笔记进行了语言检测；针对英文笔记，提取了嵌入的URL并识别了每则笔记的讨论主题；此外，还构建了贡献者之间的月度交互网络。综合描述性分析、数据集、代码及文献综述，本研究为推进Community Notes及更广泛的社区内容审核机制研究奠定了基础。