Measuring Wiki viability: An empirical assessment of the social dynamics of a large sample of Wikis (original) (raw)
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2008
ABSTRACT This paper assesses the content-and population-dynamics of a large sample of wikis, over a timespan of several months, in order to identify basic features that may predict or induce different types of fate. We analyze and discuss, in particular, the correlation of various macroscopic indicators, structural features and governance policies with wiki growth patterns.
Critical mass of what? Exploring community growth in WikiProjects
Fledgling online communities often hope to achieve critical mass so that the community becomes sustainable. This concept however is not well understood. At what point does a community achieve critical mass, and how does the community know this? Furthermore, online communities become sustainable when they achieve a mass of what? We explore this question by analyzing growth in a large number of online communities on Wikipedia. We find that individual communities often have different patterns of growth of membership from its pattern of growth of contribution or production. We also find that in the early stages of community development, building membership has a greater impact on community production and activity in later periods than accumulating many contributions early on, and this is especially true when there is more diversity in the early participants in a community. We also show that participation from a community's "power users" in its early stage is not as valuable to sustainability as the collective contributions of those who make only small contributions. We argue that critical mass is established by developing a diverse set of community members with heterogeneous interests and resources, and not purely by accumulating content.
Wikipedia usage patterns: The dynamics of growth
2008
Wikis have attracted attention as a powerful technological platform on which to harness the potential benefits of collective knowledge. Current literature identifies different behavioral factors that modulate the interaction between contributors and wikis. Some inhibit growth while others enhance it. However, while these individual factors have been identified in the literature, their collective effects have not yet been identified. In this paper, we use the system dynamics methodology, and a survey of Wikipedia users, to propose a holistic model of the interaction among different factors and their collective impact on Wikipedia growth. The model is simulated to examine its ability to replicate observed growth patterns of Wikipedia metrics. Results indicate that the model is a reasonable starting point for understanding observed Wiki growth patterns. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in the literature to synthesize a holistic model of the forces underlying Wiki growth.
Community Vital Signs: Measuring Wikipedia Communities’ Sustainable Growth and Renewal
Sustainability
Wikipedia is an undeniably successful project, with unprecedented numbers of online volunteer contributors. After 2007, researchers started to observe that the number of active editors for the largest Wikipedias declined after rapid initial growth. Years after those announcements, researchers and community activists still need to understand how to measure community health. In this paper, we study patterns of growth, decline and stagnation, and we propose the creation of 6 sets of language-independent indicators that we call “Vital Signs”. Three focus on the general population of active editors creating content: retention, stability, and balance; the other three are related to specific community functions: specialists, administrators, and global community participation. We borrow the analogy from the medical field, as these indicators represent a first step in defining the health status of a community; they can constitute a valuable reference point to foresee and prevent future risks...
Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization
PeerJ Computer Science, 2022
Peer production online communities are groups of people that collaboratively engage in the building of common resources such as wikis and open source projects. In such communities, participation is highly unequal: few people concentrate the majority of the workload, while the rest provide irregular and sporadic contributions. The distribution of participation is typically characterized as a power law distribution. However, recent statistical studies on empirical data have challenged the power law dominance in other domains. This work critically examines the assumption that the distribution of participation in wikis follows such distribution. We use statistical tools to analyse over 6,000 wikis from Wikia/Fandom, the largest wiki repository. We study the empirical distribution of each wiki comparing it with different well-known skewed distributions. The results show that the power law performs poorly, surpassed by three others with a more moderated heavy-tail behavior. In particular,...
2008
ABSTRACT One of the major issues facing socially-driven content and collaborative work on the Web (such as Wikipedia) is the lack of tools to measure at large scale the evolution of content (in terms of quality and quantity), to reduce the dropout rate of active contributors or to detect vandalism in a timely manner.
The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia
Proceedings of the 5th …, 2009
Prior research on Wikipedia has characterized the growth in content and editors as being fundamentally exponential in nature, extrapolating current trends into the future. We show that recent editing activity suggests that Wikipedia growth has slowed, and perhaps plateaued, indicating that it may have come against its limits to growth. We measure growth, population shifts, and patterns of editor and administrator activities, contrasting these against past results where possible. Both the rate of page growth and editor growth has declined. As growth has declined, there are indicators of increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits. We discuss some possible explanations for these new developments in Wikipedia including decreased opportunities for sharing existing knowledge and increased bureaucratic stress on the socio-technical system itself.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000
In this paper we propose a theoretical framework to understand the evolving governance of internet-mediated social production. Specifically, we focus on the emergence of a collective capability that integrates knowledge relevant to large-scale production and coordination. Focusing on one of the most popular websites and reference tools, Wikipedia, we undertake an exploratory theoretical analysis to clarify the structure and mechanisms driving the endogenous change of a massive social production system. We argue that the standard transactions costs approach underpinning many extant analyses is an insufficient framework for unpacking the evolutionary character of governance. The evolution of Wikipedia and its shifting modes of governance can be better framed as a process of building a collective capability of editing and managing a new kind of encyclopaedia. By applying cluster analysis we then submit six propositions derived from this framework to a preliminary empirical testing in order to assess the morphological development of Wikipedia.
Patterns of creation and usage of Wikipedia content
2012
Wikipedia is the largest online service storing user-generated content: its pages are open to anyone for addition, deletion and modifications, and the effort of contributors is recorded and can be tracked in time.
GOVERNING SOCIAL PRODUCTION IN THE INTERNET: THE CASE OF WIKIPEDIA
2011
In this paper we propose a theoretical framework to understand the governance of internet-mediated social production. Focusing on one of the most popular websites and reference tools, Wikipedia, we undertake an exploratory theoretical analysis to clarify the structure and mechanisms driving the endogenous change of a large-scale social production system. We argue that the popular transactions costs approach underpinning many of the analyses is an insufficient framework for unpacking the evolutionary character of governance. The evolution of Wikipedia and its shifting modes of governance can be better framed as a process of building a collective capability, namely the capability of editing and managing a new kind of encyclopedia. We understand Wikipedia evolution as a learning phenomenon that gives over time rise to governance mechanisms and structures as endogenous responses to the problems and conditions that the ongoing development of Wikipedia itself has produced over the years. Finally, we put forward five empirical hypotheses to test the theoretical framework.