49,425 research outputs found
Temporal Analysis of Activity Patterns of Editors in Collaborative Mapping Project of OpenStreetMap
In the recent years Wikis have become an attractive platform for social
studies of the human behaviour. Containing millions records of edits across the
globe, collaborative systems such as Wikipedia have allowed researchers to gain
a better understanding of editors participation and their activity patterns.
However, contributions made to Geo-wikis_wiki-based collaborative mapping
projects_ differ from systems such as Wikipedia in a fundamental way due to
spatial dimension of the content that limits the contributors to a set of those
who posses local knowledge about a specific area and therefore cross-platform
studies and comparisons are required to build a comprehensive image of online
open collaboration phenomena. In this work, we study the temporal behavioural
pattern of OpenStreetMap editors, a successful example of geo-wiki, for two
European capital cities. We categorise different type of temporal patterns and
report on the historical trend within a period of 7 years of the project age.
We also draw a comparison with the previously observed editing activity
patterns of Wikipedia.Comment: Submitte
Wikipedia and the politics of mass collaboration
Working together to produce socio-technological objects, based on emergent platforms
of economic production, is of great importance in the task of political transformation and the
creation of new subjectivities. Increasingly, “collaboration” has become a veritable buzzword
used to describe the human associations that create such new media objects. In the language
of “Web 2.0”, “participatory culture”, “user-generated content”, “peer production” and
the “produser”, first and foremost we are all collaborators. In this paper I investigate recent
literature that stresses the collaborative nature of Web 2.0, and in particular, works that
address the nascent processes of peer production. I contend that this material positions such
projects as what Chantal Mouffe has described as the “post-political”; a fictitious space far
divorced from the clamour of the everyday. I analyse one Wikipedia entry to demonstrate the
distance between this post-political discourse of collaboration and the realities it describes,
and finish by arguing for a more politicised notion of collaboration
Coordination and Efficiency in Decentralized Collaboration
Environments for decentralized on-line collaboration are now widespread on
the Web, underpinning open-source efforts, knowledge creation sites including
Wikipedia, and other experiments in joint production. When a distributed group
works together in such a setting, the mechanisms they use for coordination can
play an important role in the effectiveness of the group's performance.
Here we consider the trade-offs inherent in coordination in these on-line
settings, balancing the benefits to collaboration with the cost in effort that
could be spent in other ways. We consider two diverse domains that each contain
a wide range of collaborations taking place simultaneously -- Wikipedia and
GitHub -- allowing us to study how coordination varies across different
projects. We analyze trade-offs in coordination along two main dimensions,
finding similar effects in both our domains of study: first we show that, in
aggregate, high-status projects on these sites manage the coordination
trade-off at a different level than typical projects; and second, we show that
projects use a different balance of coordination when they are "crowded," with
relatively small size but many participants. We also develop a stylized
theoretical model for the cost-benefit trade-off inherent in coordination and
show that it qualitatively matches the trade-offs we observe between
crowdedness and coordination.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, ICWSM 2015, in Proc. 9th International AAAI
Conference on Weblogs and Social Medi
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
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