Not at Home on the Range: Peer Production and the Urban/Rural Divide

ABSTRACT Wikipedia articles about places, OpenStreetMap features, and other forms of peer-produced content have become critical sources of geographic knowledge for humans and intelligent technologies. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of the peer production model across the rural/urban divide, a divide that has been shown to be an important factor in many online social systems. We find that in both Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, peer-produced content about rural areas is of systematically lower quality, is less likely to have been produced by contributors who focus on the local area, and is more likely to have been generated by automated software agents (i.e. "bots"). We then codify the systemic challenges inherent to characterizing rural phenomena through peer production and discuss potential solutions

Not at Home on the Range: Peer Production and the Urban/Rural Divide

ABSTRACT Wikipedia articles about places, OpenStreetMap features, and other forms of peer-produced content have become critical sources of geographic knowledge for humans and intelligent technologies. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of the peer production model across the rural/urban divide, a divide that has been shown to be an important factor in many online social systems. We find that in both Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap, peer-produced content about rural areas is of systematically lower quality, is less likely to have been produced by contributors who focus on the local area, and is more likely to have been generated by automated software agents (i.e. "bots"). We then codify the systemic challenges inherent to characterizing rural phenomena through peer production and discuss potential solutions

Misalignment Between Supply and Demand of Quality Content in Peer Production Communities

In peer production communities, individual community members typically decide for themselves where to make contributions, often driven by factors such as “fun” or a belief that “information should be free”. However, the extent to which this bottom-up, interest-driven content production paradigm meets the needs of consumers of this content is unclear. In this paper, we introduce an analytical framework for studying the relationship between content production and consumption in peer production communities. Applying our framework to four large Wikipedia language editions, we find extensive misalignment between production and consumption in all of them. We also show that this misalignment has an enormous effect on Wikipedias readers. For example, over 1.5 billion monthly pageviews in the English Wikipedia go to articles that would be of much higher quality if editors optimally distributed their work to meet reader demand. Examining misalignment in more detail, we observe that there is an excess of high-quality content about certain specific topics, and that the majority of articles with insufficient quality are in a stable state (i.e. not breaking news). Finally, we discuss technolo- gies and community practises that can help reduce the misalignment between the supply of and demand for high-quality content in peer production communities

Wikipedia @ 20

Wikipedia’s first twenty years: how what began as an experiment in collaboration became the world’s most popular reference work. We have been looking things up in Wikipedia for twenty years. What began almost by accident—a wiki attached to a nascent online encyclopedia—has become the world’s most popular reference work. Regarded at first as the scholarly equivalent of a Big Mac, Wikipedia is now known for its reliable sourcing and as a bastion of (mostly) reasoned interaction. How has Wikipedia, built on a model of radical collaboration, remained true to its original mission of “free access to the sum of all human knowledge” when other tech phenomena have devolved into advertising platforms? In this book, scholars, activists, and volunteers reflect on Wikipedia’s first twenty years, revealing connections across disciplines and borders, languages and data, the professional and personal. The contributors consider Wikipedia’s history, the richness of the connections that underpin it, and its founding vision. Their essays look at, among other things, the shift from bewilderment to respect in press coverage of Wikipedia; Wikipedia as “the most important laboratory for social scientific and computing research in history”; and the acknowledgment that “free access” includes not just access to the material but freedom to contribute—that the summation of all human knowledge is biased by who documents it. Contributors Phoebe Ayers, Omer Benjakob, Yochai Benkler, William Beutler, Siko Bouterse, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Amy Carleton, Robert Cummings, LiAnna L. Davis, Siân Evans, Heather Ford, Stephen Harrison, Heather Hart, Benjamin Mako Hill, Dariusz Jemielniak, Brian Keegan, Jackie Koerner, Alexandria Lockett, Jacqueline Mabey, Katherine Maher, Michael Mandiberg, Stephane Coillet-Matillon, Cecelia A. Musselman, Eliza Myrie, Jake Orlowitz, Ian A. Ramjohn, Joseph Reagle, Anasuya Sengupta, Aaron Shaw, Melissa Tamani, Jina Valentine, Matthew Vetter, Adele Vrana, Denny Vrandeči