Participation of New Editors After Times of Shock on Wikipedia

User participation is vital to the success of collaborative crowdsourcing platforms such as Wikipedia. Previously user participation has been studied during “normal times”. However, less is known about participation following shocks that draw attention to an article. Such events can be recruiting opportunities due to increased attention; but can also pose a threat to the quality and control of the article and drive away newcomers. We study the collaborative dynamics of Wikipedia articles after times corresponding to shocks generated by drastic increases in attention as indicated by data from Google trends.We find that participation following such events is indeed different from participation during normal times–both newcomers and incumbents participate at higher rates during shocks. We also identify collaboration dynamics that mediate the effects of shocks on continued participation after the shock. The impact of shocks on participation is mediated by the amount of negative feedback given to newcomers in the form of reverted edits and the amount of coordination editors engage in through edits of the article’s talk page.National Science Foundation Grant No. IIS-1617820Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148429/1/Zhang et al. 2019.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148429/4/3253-Article Text-6302-1-10-20190531.pdfDescription of Zhang et al. 2019.pdf : Preprint versionDescription of 3253-Article Text-6302-1-10-20190531.pdf : Final Versio

Shocking the Crowd: The Effect of Censorship Shocks on Chinese Wikipedia

Collaborative crowdsourcing has become a popular approach to organizing work across the globe. Being global also means being vulnerable to shocks -- unforeseen events that disrupt crowds -- that originate from any country. In this study, we examine changes in collaborative behavior of editors of Chinese Wikipedia that arise due to the 2005 government censor- ship in mainland China. Using the exogenous variation in the fraction of editors blocked across different articles due to the censorship, we examine the impact of reduction in group size, which we denote as the shock level, on three collaborative behavior measures: volume of activity, centralization, and conflict. We find that activity and conflict drop on articles that face a shock, whereas centralization increases. The impact of a shock on activity increases with shock level, whereas the impact on centralization and conflict is higher for moderate shock levels than for very small or very high shock levels. These findings provide support for threat rigidity theory -- originally introduced in the organizational theory literature -- in the context of large-scale collaborative crowds

Wikipedia and Westminster: Quality and Dynamics of Wikipedia Pages about UK Politicians

Wikipedia is a major source of information providing a large variety of content online, trusted by readers from around the world. Readers go to Wikipedia to get reliable information about different subjects, one of the most popular being living people, and especially politicians. While a lot is known about the general usage and information consumption on Wikipedia, less is known about the life-cycle and quality of Wikipedia articles in the context of politics. The aim of this study is to quantify and qualify content production and consumption for articles about politicians, with a specific focus on UK Members of Parliament (MPs). First, we analyze spatio-temporal patterns of readers' and editors' engagement with MPs' Wikipedia pages, finding huge peaks of attention during election times, related to signs of engagement on other social media (e.g. Twitter). Second, we quantify editors' polarisation and find that most editors specialize in a specific party and choose specific news outlets as references. Finally we observe that the average citation quality is pretty high, with statements on 'Early life and career' missing citations most often (18%).Comment: A preprint of accepted publication at the 31ST ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (HT'20

WikiLiteracy

In January 2019 the University of Derby delivered its first module entirely dedicated to and structured around editing and writing articles for Wikipedia. The course focused on using Wikipedia as a means to improve students’ skills in writing for public consumption, in addition to enhancing their digital and collaborative skills. Students contributed to 118 articles across a range of topics, which were viewed over 11.2 million times, providing them with a public platform no university assignment could match, and introduced them to the challenges of interaction and engagement in a global editing community. Students’ confidence in their digital capabilities was assessed at the start and end of the module and showed a clear increase in confidence across all categories

Content Growth and Attention Contagion in Information Networks: Addressing Information Poverty on Wikipedia

Open collaboration platforms have fundamentally changed the way that knowledge is produced, disseminated, and consumed. In these systems, contributions arise organically with little to no central governance. Although such decentralization provides many benefits, a lack of broad oversight and coordination can leave questions of information poverty and skewness to the mercy of the system’s natural dynamics. Unfortunately, we still lack a basic understanding of the dynamics at play in these systems and specifically, how contribution and attention interact and propagate through information networks. We leverage a large-scale natural experiment to study how exogenous content contributions to Wikipedia articles affect the attention that they attract and how that attention spills over to other articles in the network. Results reveal that exogenously added content leads to significant, substantial, and long-term increases in both content consumption and subsequent contributions. Furthermore, we find significant attention spillover to downstream hyperlinked articles. Through both analytical estimation and empirically informed simulation, we evaluate policies to harness this attention contagion to address the problem of information poverty and skewness. We find that harnessing attention contagion can lead to as much as a twofold increase in the total attention flow to clusters of disadvantaged articles. Our findings have important policy implications for open collaboration platforms and information networks

Herding a Deluge of Good Samaritans: How GitHub Projects Respond to Increased Attention

Collaborative crowdsourcing is a well-established model of work, especially in the case of open source software development. The structure and operation of these virtual and loosely-knit teams differ from traditional organizations. As such, little is known about how their behavior may change in response to an increase in external attention. To understand these dynamics, we analyze millions of actions of thousands of contributors in over 1100 open source software projects that topped the GitHub Trending Projects page and thus experienced a large increase in attention, in comparison to a control group of projects identified through propensity score matching. In carrying out our research, we use the lens of organizational change, which considers the challenges teams face during rapid growth and how they adapt their work routines, organizational structure, and management style. We show that trending results in an explosive growth in the effective team size. However, most newcomers make only shallow and transient contributions. In response, the original team transitions towards administrative roles, responding to requests and reviewing work done by newcomers. Projects evolve towards a more distributed coordination model with newcomers becoming more central, albeit in limited ways. Additionally, teams become more modular with subgroups specializing in different aspects of the project. We discuss broader implications for collaborative crowdsourcing teams that face attention shocks.National Science Foundation Grant No. IIS-1617820.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153786/1/Maldeniya et al. 2020.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/153786/4/Maldeniya et al. 2020 Published Version.pdfDescription of Maldeniya et al. 2020.pdf : Main ArticleDescription of Maldeniya et al. 2020 Published Version.pdf : Published Versio

Determining the influence of reddit posts on wikipedia pageviews

Copyright © 2015, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. The activity of passive content consumers on social media sites is typically difficult to measure. This paper explores the activity of a subset of such consumers by looking at the influence on Wikipedia pageviews of one large Reddit community which frequently links to Wikipedia articles. The subreddit used in this analysis, /r/todayilearned (TIL), features a large number of posts on an eclectic set of topics, but excludes current events, which helps rule out the primary threat to being able to make causal statements. Wikipedia's public hourly pageview data provides a unique opportunity to study the influence of a Reddit post on a Wikipedia page at different time horizons. We here present analyses using posts from 2012 in TIL, showing that the week in which a post references a specific Wikipedia article is associated with a substantial increase in pageviews relative to prior and successive weeks. We then apply functional PC A to the dataset in order to characterize pageview dynamics. We also provide a qualitative analysis of the subset of Wikipedia topics posted to Reddit

Unemployment and digital public goods contribution

Economic crises often result in massive job loss. However, although reduced employment has been shown to have many negative consequences for the affected individuals, it may also push them into new activities, such as provision of service to their communities. In this paper, we show how individuals engage in socially useful activities after an increase in unemployment. Specifically we document increased online content generation at Wikipedia, the world's largest user generated knowledge repository. Leveraging German district-level and European country-level unemployment data we analyze the relationship between the economic crisis in 2008-2010 and contributions to Wikipedia. For both data sets we find increased socially valuable activity in the form of knowledge acquisition and contributions to Wikipedia. For German districts, we observe an increased rate of content generation on Wikipedia in districts that faced greater increases in unemployment. The effect of unemployment on content generation is even stronger at the European country level. Our findings suggest that public goods provision increases as a positive side effect of economic crises

The Virtues of Moderation

On a Friday in 2005, the Los Angeles Times launched an experiment: a “wikitorial” on the Iraq War that any of the paper’s readers could edit. By Sunday, the experiment had ended in abject failure: vandals overran it with crude profanity and graphic pornography. The wikitorial took its inspiration and its technology from Wikipedia, but missed something essential about how the “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit” staves off abuse while maintaining its core commitment to open participation. The difference is moderation: the governance mechanisms that structure participation in a community to facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse. Town meetings have moderators, and so do online communities. A community’s moderators can promote posts or hide them, honor posters or shame them, recruit users or ban them. Their decisions influence what is seen, what is valued, what is said. They create the conditions under which cooperation is possible. This Article provides a novel taxonomy of moderation in online communities. It breaks down the basic verbs of moderation — exclusion, pricing, organizing, and norm-setting — and shows how they help communities walk the tightrope between the chaos of too much freedom and the sterility of too much control. Scholars studying the commons can learn from moderation, and so can policy-makers debating the regulation of online communities