Investigating the determinants of contribution value in Wikipedia

International Journal of Distributed Systems and Technologies, 2012

While the overall amount of user contributions in various namespaces has been discussed in previous research, the question of how and where users contribute, depending on their time spent in Wikipedia, is still open. This study analyzed contribution patterns in three namespaces of 685,897 active users of English Wikipedia since its inception. User editing behaviors were analyzed according to the amount of time spent within Wikipedia where contributions in content-oriented spaces were compared with social-oriented namespaces.

Comunicar, 2018

Wikipedia is a widely used resource by university students, but it is not necessarily regarded as being reliable and trustworthy by them, nor is it seen as a context in which to make content contributions. This paper presents a teaching and research project that consisted in having students edit or create Wikipedia articles and testing whether or not this experience changed their perceived value of the platform. We conducted our experience at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) and University of Niš (Niš, Serbia) with a total number of 240 students. These students edited articles and answered two questionnaires, one before and one after the exercise. We compared the pre and post experience answers to the questionnaires with a series of paired samples t-tests, through which our data showed that students did significantly change their perception of reliability and usefulness, and of likeliness of finding false information on Wikipedia. Their appreciation of the task of writing Wikipedia articles, in terms of it being interesting and challenge also increased. They did not significantly change, however, their judgement on the social value of the platform, neither in the university nor in the general context. In addition, the open questions and informal feedback allowed us to gather valuable insights towards the evaluation of the overall experience.

2011

Wiki is a conversational knowledge management (KM) tool that has the potential to alleviate the bottlenecks in knowledge creation and sharing associated with traditional KM systems. An understanding of the motivational forces driving participation is paramount for the success of such KM initiatives. The inherent tension between traditional managerial practices and wikis' affordances calls for the development of theoretical frameworks tailored to this unique setting. Our study of corporate wikis investigates a wiki-based organizational encyclopedia, Bluepedia. The primary purpose of this study is to provide an account of the motivational dynamics around content contribution evoked in a corporate wiki context. We center our attention on the differences between those who are assigned to edit Bluepedia as part of their job and those who edit Bluepedia outside of their formal job responsibility. An analysis of a large-scale web-survey data from one multinational firm shows that, in line with the 'crowding out effect', those not formally assigned to the task are driven primarily by intrinsic motivations, while are those who contribute content as part of their regular job, however, are primarily driven by extrinsic motivations. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

2006

A survey of 168 corporate wiki users was conducted. Findings indicate that corporate wikis appear to be sustainable. Users stated three main types of benefits from corporate wikis: enhanced reputation, work made easier, and helping the organization to improve its processes. These benefits were seen as more likely when the wiki was used for tasks requiring novel solutions and the information posted was from credible sources. Users acknowledged making a variety of contributions, which suggests that they could be categorized as "synthesizers" and "adders". Synthesizers' frequency of contribution was affected more by their impact on other wiki users, while adders' contribution frequency was affected more by being able to accomplish their immediate work.

2009

Wikipedia, one of the top ten most visited websites, is commonly viewed as the largest online reference for encyclopedic knowledge. Because of its open editing model -allowing anyone to enter and edit content-Wikipedia's overall quality has often been questioned as a source of reliable information. Lack of study of the open editing model of Wikipedia and its effectiveness has resulted in a new generation of wikis that restrict contributions to registered users only, using their real names. In this paper, we present an empirical study of user contributions to Wikipedia. We statistically analyze contributions by both anonymous and registered users. The results show that submissions of anonymous and registered users in Wikipedia suggest a power law behavior. About 80% of the revisions are submitted by less than 7% of the users, most of whom are registered users. To further refine the analyzes, we use the Wiki Trust Model (WTM), a user reputation model developed in our previous work to assign a reputation value to each user. As expected, the results show that registered users contribute higher quality content and therefore are assigned higher reputation values. However, a significant number of anonymous users also contribute high-quality content. We provide further evidence that regardless of a user s' attribution, registered or anonymous, high reputation users are the dominant contributors that actively edit Wikipedia articles in order to remove vandalism or poor quality content.

2020

Public discussions on digital technology and the Internet tend generally to be framed in epochalist terms and to be rife with utopian and dystopian projections of our imminent digital futures (Du Gay 2003; Henningsen and Larsen, this volume). As many observers have noted, in recent years a shift in the tone of such discussions has occurred, as the optimism that accrued to the Web 2.0 and social media 10-15 years ago has waned, with darker visions being brought to the fore. Today, a probing of the role of social media as vehicles of misinformation, commoditization, and mass surveillance looms large in popular and scholarly discussions alike (Fuchs et al. 2012; Van Dijck 2013). However, there is one notable exception to this trend in the current flora of social media: since the turn of the century, Wikipedia and platforms based on the wiki-technology have been a constant source of positive wonder among commentators. This relates to the democratic nature of the Wikipedia organization, to the deliberative aspect of content production, and to the platforms' persistent avoidance of commercialism (Firer-Blaes and Fuchs 2014; Van Dijck 2013; Wright 2010).¹ Prosumers (Ritzer et al. 2012; Toffler 1980) have contributed millions of articles for Wikipedia and other wiki-platforms. The true wonder of wiki-platforms is their capacity to mobilize contributors in great numbers and to incite them to write and edit articles. Based on a case study of the Norwegian local history wiki platform lokalhistoriewiki.no, we seek to understand what motivates contributors to engage in wiki work, and how this can be specified theoretically. We argue that wiki work is an avenue for the exertion of craftsmanship (Sennett 2009), and that it involves psychological processes of flow (Csikszentmihalyi 2008[1991]) and social processes of self-externalization (Elster 1989). 1 Others present accounts of Wikipedia in a less enchanted tone, pointing to the challenges posed by "Wikipedia trolls" (Shachaf and Hara 2010) and "editorial wars" on the site (Yasseri et al. 2012).

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.

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.

Proceedings of the ACM 2009 …, 2009

Open content web sites depend on users to produce information of value. Wikipedia is the largest and most well-known such site. Previous work has shown that a small fraction of editors -Wikipedians -do most of the work and produce most of the value. Other work has offered conjectures about how Wikipedians differ from other editors and how Wikipedians change over time. We quantify and test these conjectures. Our key findings include: Wikipedians' edits last longer; Wikipedians invoke community norms more often to justify their edits; on many dimensions of activity, Wikipedians start intensely, tail off a little, then maintain a relatively high level of activity over the course of their career. Finally, we show that the amount of work done by Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians differs significantly from their very first day. Our results suggest a design opportunity: customizing the initial user experience to improve retention and channel new users' intense energy.

Ninth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2015

Is it an encyclopedia or a social network? Without considering both aspects it would not be possible to understand how a worldwide army of editors created the largest online knowledge repository. Wikipedia has a consistent set of rules and it responds to many of the User Engagement Framework attributes, and this is why it works. In this paper , we identify these confirmed attributes as well as those presenting problems. We explain that although having a strong editor base Wikipedia is finding it challenging to maintain this base or increase its size. In order to understand this, scholars have analyzed Wikipedia using current metrics like user session and activity. We conclude there exist opportunities to analyze engagement in new aspects in order to understand its success, as well as to redesign mechanisms to improve the system and help the transition between reader and editor.