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Although peer production has created valuable information goods like Wikipedia, the GNU/Linux operating system, and Reddit, the majority of attempts at peer production achieve very little. In work groups and teams, coordination and social integration—manifested via dense, integrative communication networks—predict success. We hypothesize that the conditions in which new peer production communities operate make communication problems common and make coordination and integration more difficult, and that variation in the structure of project communication networks will predict project success. In this article, we measure communication networks for 999 early-stage peer production wikis. We assess whether communities displaying network markers of coordination and social integration are more productive and long-lasting. Contrary to our expectations, we find a very weak relationship between communication structure and collaborative performance. We propose that technology may serve as a partial substitute for communication in coordinating work and integrating newcomers in peer production.

 

The governance of many online communities relies on rules created by participants. However, prior work provides limited evidence about how these self-governance efforts compare and relate to one another across communities. Studies tend either to analyze communities as discrete entities or consider communities that coexist within a hierarchically-managed platform. In this paper, we investigate both comparative and relational dimensions of self-governance in similar communities. We use exhaustive trace data from the five largest language editions of Wikipedia over almost 20 years since their founding, and consider both patterns in rule-making and overlaps in rule sets. We find similar rule-making activity across the five communities that replicates and extends prior work on English language Wikipedia alone. However, we also find that these Wikipedias have increasingly unique rule sets, even as editing activity concentrates on rules shared between them. Self-governing communities aligned in key ways may share a common core of rules and rule-making practices as they develop and sustain institutional variations. 

Why do some peer production projects do a better job at engaging potential contributors than others? We address this question by comparing three Indian language Wikipedias, namely, Malayalam, Marathi, and Kannada. We found that although the three projects share goals, technological infrastructure, and a similar set of challenges, Malayalam Wikipedia’s community engages language speakers in contributing at a much higher rate than the others. Drawing from a grounded theory analysis of interviews with 18 community participants from the three projects, we found that experience with participatory governance and free/open-source software in the Malayalam community supported high engagement of contributors. Counterintuitively, we found that financial resources intended to increase participation in the Marathi and Kannada communities hindered the growth of these communities. Our findings underscore the importance of social and cultural context in the trajectories of peer production communities. 

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. 

Integrating new users into a community with complex norms presents a challenge for peer production projects like Wikipedia. We present The Wikipedia Adventure (TWA): an interactive tutorial that offers a structured and gamified introduction to Wikipedia. In addition to describing the design of the system, we present two empirical evaluations. First, we report on a survey of users, who responded very positively to the tutorial. Second, we report results from a large-scale invitation-based field experiment that tests whether using TWA increased newcomers' subsequent contributions to Wikipedia. We find no effect of either using the tutorial or of being invited to do so over a period of 180 days. We conclude that TWA produces a positive socialization experience for those who choose to use it, but that it does not alter patterns of newcomer activity. We reflect on the implications of these mixed results for the evaluation of similar social computing systems.