An official website of the United States government
Peer produced goods, such as online knowledge bases and free/libre open source software rely on contributors who often choose their tasks regardless of consumer needs. These goods are susceptible to underproduction: when popular goods are relatively low quality. Although underproduction is a common feature of peer production, very little is known about how to counteract it. We use a detailed longitudinal dataset from English Wikipedia to show that more experienced contributors—including those who contribute without an account—tend to contribute to underproduced goods. A within-person analysis shows that contributors’ efforts shift toward underproduced goods over time. These findings illustrate the value of retaining contributors in peer production, including those contributing without accounts, as a means to counter underproduction.
more »
« less
Bursty Coordination in Online Communities
The collective intelligence of online communities often depends on implicit forms of coordination, given the fluidity of membership and the lack of traditional hierarchies and associated incentive structures. This coordination drives knowledge production. Studying temporal dynamics may help elucidate how coordination happens. Specifically, the rate of interaction with an artifact such as a Wikipedia page can function as a signal that affects future interactions. Many activities can be characterized as bursty, meaning activity is not evenly spread or random, but is instead concentrated. This study analyzes 3,260 Wikipedia articles and shows that the coordination pattern in the Wikipedia community is mostly bursty. More importantly, the extent of burstiness affects article quality. This work highlights the important role temporal dynamics can play in the coordination process in online communities, and how it can affect the quality of knowledge production.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10171236
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ICIS 2019 Proceedings
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Online communities, like Wikipedia, produce valuable public information goods. Whereas some of these communities require would-be contributors to create accounts, many do not. Does this requirement catalyze cooperation or inhibit participation? Prior research provides divergent predictions but little causal evidence. We conduct an empirical test using longitudinal data from 136 natural experiments where would-be contributors to wikis were suddenly required to log in to contribute. Requiring accounts leads to a small increase in account creation, but reduces both high- and low-quality contributions from registered and unregistered participants. Although the change deters a large portion of low-quality participation, the vast majority of deterred contributions are of higher quality. We conclude that requiring accounts introduces an undertheorized tradeoff for public goods production in interactive communication systems.more » « less
-
Online communities are important organizational forms where members socialize and share information. Curiously, different online communities often overlap considerably in topic and membership. Recent research has investigated competition and mutualism among overlapping online communities through the lens of organizational ecology; however, it has not accounted for how the nonlinear dynamics of online attention may lead to episodic competition and mutualism. Neither has it explored the origins of competition and mutualism in the processes by which online communities select or adapt to their niches. This paper presents a large-scale study of 8,806 Reddit communities belonging to 1,919 clusters of high user overlap over a 5-year period. The method uses nonlinear time series methods to infer bursty, often short-lived ecological dynamics. Results reveal that mutualism episodes are longer lived and slightly more frequent than competition episodes. Next, it tests whether online communities find their niches by specializing to avoid competition using panel regression models. It finds that competitive ecological interactions lead to decreasing topic and user overlaps; however, changes that decrease such niche overlaps do not lead to mutualism. The discussion considers future designs for online community ecosystem management.more » « less
-
We present a corpus that encompasses the complete history of conversations between contributors to Wikipedia, one of the largest online collaborative communities. By recording the intermediate states of conversations—including not only comments and replies, but also their modifications, deletions and restorations—this data offers an unprecedented view of online conversation. This level of detail supports new research questions pertaining to the process (and challenges) of large-scale online collaboration. We illustrate the corpus’ potential with two case studies that highlight new perspectives on earlier work. First, we explore how a person’s conversational behavior depends on how they relate to the discussion’s venue. Second, we show that community moderation of toxic behavior happens at a higher rate than previously estimated. Finally the reconstruction framework is designed to be language agnostic, and we show that it can extract high quality conversational data in both Chinese and English.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Protest is a collective action problem and can be modeled as a coordination game in which people take an action with the potential to achieve shared mutual benefits. In game-theoretic contexts, successful coordination requires that people know each others' willingness to participate, and that this information is common knowledge among a sufficient number of people. We develop an agent-based model of collective action that was the first to combine social structure and individual incentives. Another novel aspect of the model is that a social network increases in density (i.e., new graph edges are formed) over time. The model studies the formation of common knowledge through local interactions and the characterizing social network structures. We use four real-world, data-mined social networks (Facebook, Wikipedia, email, and peer-to-peer networks) and one scale-free network, and conduct computational experiments to study contagion dynamics under different conditions.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
