Collective Meaning Cascades but Strange Ducks Swim Upstream: Facilitating Collective Meaning-making through Co-development of AI Models

Communities of practice operate by developing, sharing, and formalizing concepts together — collective meaning-making — thereby enabling all their community members to work together effectively. In the context of Wikipedia, these concepts include article quality, vandalism, and other subjective aspects of collective work. AI and machine learning have proven to be powerful tools for facilitating collaboration at scale by modeling and applying shared concepts. We examine meaning-making in parallel with aligning AI behavior. We describe a case study of modeling the quality of articles in Dutch Wikipedia using an AI model, while engaging in a meaning-making process with Dutch Wikipedians. This case blurs the line between social governance and how meaning is reshaped in an AI model. Based on the case study, we present the Collective Meaning Cycle, a framework that describes the bidirectional relationship between modeling and meaning-making. We also provide implications for the practice of participatory AI design.