Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia (original) (raw)
Related papers
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.
Characterization and prediction of Wikipedia edit wars
2011
We present a new, efficient method for automatically detecting conflict cases and test it on five different language Wikipedias. We discuss how the number of edits, reverts, the length of discussions deviate in such pages from those following the general workflow.
2010
Though largely spontaneous and loosely regulated, the process of peer production within online communities is also supplemented by additional coordination mechanisms. In this respect, we study an emergent organizational practice of the Wikipedia community, the use of template messages, which seems to act as effective and parsimonious coordination device to signal quality concerns or other issues that need to be addressed. We focus on the template "NPOV", which signals breaches on the fundamental policy of neutrality of Wikipedia articles, and we show how and to what extent putting such template on a page affects the editing process. We notably find that intensity of editing increases immediately after the "NPOV" template appears and that controversies about articles which have received the attention of a more limited group of editors before they were tagged as controversial have a lower chance to be treated quickly.
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.
Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia
Proceedings of the …, 2007
Wikipedia's brilliance and curse is that any user can edit any of the encyclopedia entries. We introduce the notion of the impact of an edit, measured by the number of times the edited version is viewed. Using several datasets, including recent logs of all article views, we show that frequent editors dominate what people see when they visit Wikipedia, and that this domination is increasing. * Similarly, using the same impact measure, we show that the probability of a typical article view being damaged is small but increasing, and we present empirically grounded classes of damage. Finally, we make policy recommendations for Wikipedia and other wikis in light of these findings.
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.
Ecology of the digital world of Wikipedia
Scientific Reports
Wikipedia, a paradigmatic example of online knowledge space is organized in a collaborative, bottom-up way with voluntary contributions, yet it maintains a level of reliability comparable to that of traditional encyclopedias. The lack of selected professional writers and editors makes the judgement about quality and trustworthiness of the articles a real challenge. Here we show that a self-consistent metrics for the network defined by the edit records captures well the character of editors’ activity and the articles’ level of complexity. Using our metrics, one can better identify the human-labeled high-quality articles, e.g., “featured” ones, and differentiate them from the popular and controversial articles. Furthermore, the dynamics of the editor-article system is also well captured by the metrics, revealing the evolutionary pathways of articles and diverse roles of editors. We demonstrate that the collective effort of the editors indeed drives to the direction of article improvem...
An Agent-Based Model of Edit Wars in Wikipedia: How and When Consensus is Reached
Edit wars are conflicts among editors of Wikipedia when editors repeatedly overwrite each other's content. Edit wars can last from a few days to several years before reaching consensus often leading to a loss of content quality. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to create an agent-based model of edit wars in order to study the influence of various factors involved in consensus formation. We model the behavior of agents using theories of group stability and reinforcement learning. We show that increasing the number of credible or trustworthy agents and agents with a neutral point of view decreases the time taken to reach consensus, whereas the duration is longest when agents with opposing views are in equal proportion. Our model can be used to study the behavior of members in online communities and to inform policies and guidelines for participation.