Wisdom of the Crowds: Decentralized Knowledge Construction in Wikipedia (original) (raw)
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Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia
Proceedings of the ACM 2008 conference on Computer supported cooperative work - CSCW '08
Wikipedia's success is often attributed to involving large numbers of contributors who improve the accuracy, completeness and clarity of articles while reducing bias. However, because of the high coordination needed to collaboratively write an article, increasing the number of contributors is costly. We examined how the number of editors in Wikipedia and the coordination methods they use affect article quality. We distinguish between explicit coordination, in which editors plan the article through communication, and implicit coordination, in which a subset of editors set direction by doing the majority of the work. Adding more editors to an article improved article quality only when they used appropriate coordination techniques and was harmful when they did not. Implicit coordination through concentrating the work was more helpful when many editors contributed, but explicit coordination through communication was not. Both types of coordination improved quality more when an article was in a formative stage. These results demonstrate the critical importance of coordination in effectively harnessing the "wisdom of the crowd" in online production environments.
Learning to trust the crowd: Some lessons from Wikipedia
Inspired by the open source software (OSS) movement, Wikipedia has gone Jitrther than any OSS project in decentralizing its qualitjl control task. This is seen by many as a fatalJan: In this short paper, I will t y to show that it is rather a shrewd and fertile design choice. First, I will describe the precise way in which Wikipedia is more decentralized than OSS projects.
A jury of your peers: quality, experience and ownership in Wikipedia
Proceedings of the 5th …, 2009
Wikipedia is a highly successful example of what mass collaboration in an informal peer review system can accomplish. In this paper, we examine the role that the quality of the contributions, the experience of the contributors and the ownership of the content play in the decisions over which contributions become part of Wikipedia and which ones are rejected by the community. We introduce and justify a versatile metric for automatically measuring the quality of a contribution. We find little evidence that experience helps contributors avoid rejection. In fact, as they gain experience, contributors are even more likely to have their work rejected. We also find strong evidence of ownership behaviors in practice despite the fact that ownership of content is discouraged within Wikipedia.
Cooperation and quality in wikipedia
Proceedings of the 2007 international symposium on Wikis - WikiSym '07, 2007
The rise of the Internet has enabled collaboration and cooperation on an unprecedentedly large scale. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which presently comprises 7.2 million articles created by 7.04 million distinct editors, provides a consummate example. We examined all 50 million edits made to the 1.5 million English-language Wikipedia articles and found that the high-quality articles are distinguished by a marked increase in number of edits, number of editors, and intensity of cooperative behavior, as compared to other articles of similar visibility and age. This is significant because in other domains, fruitful cooperation has proven to be difficult to sustain as the size of the collaboration increases. Furthermore, in spite of the vagaries of human behavior, we show that Wikipedia articles accrete edits according to a simple stochastic mechanism in which edits beget edits. Topics of high interest or relevance are thus naturally brought to the forefront of quality.
Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia
First Monday, 2007
Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by 5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite the apparent lack of order, the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million articles in the English-language Wikipedia follow strong certain overall regularities. We show that the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits. We also demonstrate a crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.
Improving Wiki Article Quality Through Crowd Coordination
International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems, 2000
In this paper we propose a crowd coordination mechanism to increase the quality of articles produced in wiki systems. Wikis constitute promising social digital ecosystems for collaborative knowledge creation on the Web. However, as a result of the purely self-coordinated manner that they function, they cannot ensure the quality of the produced articles -an issue that affects their reliability and acceptance. We show that wiki article quality optimization can be formulated as a resource allocation problem. Contributors are selected from the wiki community crowd according to their skills, and matched to the articles they can improve the most. A model of the English Wikipedia is given, parameterized and validated from recent field studies results. Experimental results were obtained with simulation systems implementing this model and on a series of scenarios, which include an analysis of the impact of using semantic relations between wiki domains. The obtained results indicate that the proposed mechanism can lead to the production of wiki articles of higher quality, compared to the respective results achieved by the fully selfcoordinated wiki.
Institutions of Wikipedia - The Orchestration of Volunteered Human Capital
Wikipedia represents an organizational problem that has been triumphantly overcome to create unprecedented value. How does one guide the actions of a vast, global community of individuals to build the largest and most used encyclopedia in the world? This paper examines the underlying principles of Wikipedia as a peer-production based community and the sources of its success. In order to investigate this success, I examine its governance structure, the nature of the interaction between participants and articles, the resulting incentives and the effects these have in practice. I use a simple sequential-choice model from game theory to capture the decisions Wikipedia participants face and discuss how the laws which guide participation affect the payoffs of actions.
QuWi: quality control in Wikipedia
2009
Abstract We propose and evaluate QuWi (Quality in Wikipedia), a framework for quality control in Wikipedia. We build upon a previous proposal by Mizzaro [11], who proposed a method for substituting and/or complementing peer review in scholarly publishing.
Proceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Open Collaboration
In any collaborative system, people do not contribute equally. This is particularly observed to be true for systems seeking to gather contributions from a large, diverse group of people. In such settings, it is seen that a sizable amount of contribution comes from a small group of highly-active users. While it is well-understood that such users are instrumental in the system's progress, the contribution made by a large group of less-active users is not sufficiently understood. Popularly called masses, these users comprise of the majority of the system's user base. It is, therefore, important to examine their worth in the system. The literature in this direction points towards two contradicting points of view with one acknowledging masses' contribution (Ortega Hypothesis) while the other deeming them unnecessary in the system (Newton Hypothesis). Given the large-scale collaboration facilitated by Wikipedia where a large crowd with a diverse skill-set and hence unequal contribution participates, a detailed investigation of the worth of masses becomes necessary for informed policy-making. In this work, we examine whether masses help or hamper the knowledge-building in Wikipedia. We specifically consider their contribution across different contribution types pertaining to the insertion of new content as well as the administrative activities. We observe that although the individual contribution by masses is small, yet they contribute important pieces of knowledge to Wikipedia articles. The results indicate that the overall contribution of masses across several parameters even exceeds the contribution by elites. We also find that as compared to masses, highly-active users dominate the edits where no new content is inserted and only activities involving the up-keeping of the existing content such as restructuring or formatting take place. The results of the study may help in devising appropriate incentivization policies for Wikipedia and the collaborative systems in general. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; Collaborative and social computing design and evaluation methods.