Mining and Predicting Temporal Patterns in the Quality Evolution of Wikipedia Articles

Online open collaboration systems like Wikipedia are complex adaptive systems within which large numbers of individual agents and artifacts interact and co-evolve over time. A key issue in these systems is the quality of the co-created artifacts and the processes through which high-quality artifacts are produced. In this paper, we took a dynamic approach to uncover common patterns in the temporal evolution of 6,057 Wikipedia articles in the domains of roads, films, and battles. Using Dynamic Time Warping, an advanced time-series clustering method, we identified three distinctive growth patterns, namely, stalled, plateaued, and sustained. Multinomial logistic regressions to predict these different clusters suggest that the path that an article follows is determined by both its inherent attributes, such as topic importance, and the contribution and coordination of editors who collaborated on the article. Our results also suggest that different factors matter at different stages of an article’s life cycle

The Impact of Membership Overlap on the Survival of Online Communities

Online communities play an important role in society. In this paper, we study the effects of membership overlap on the survival of online communities. By analyzing the historical data of 5673 Wikia communities, we find that higher levels of membership overlap are positively associated with greater survival rate of online communities. Furthermore, we find that it is beneficial for new communities to have shared members who play a central role in other mature communities. These findings provide new insight into an important mechanism underlying successful online communities, contribute to theories of organization science, and provide several actionable steps for the hosts and creators of online communities

PROMOTING GOOD MANAGEMENT: GOVERNANCE, PROMOTION, AND LEADERSHIP IN OPEN COLLABORATION COMMUNITIES

While we do have an idea of what the leadership of open collaboration communities is responsible for at a high level, we have little knowledge of what these leaders actually do. Similarly, in an online context we understand pieces of the process managers and leaders go through to be elected, but their change in behavior once they become a manager remains unexplored. What behaviors do these leaders engage in that is different from a typical contributor to the community? How can we empirically distinguish which behaviors are characteristic of a successful leader vs. an unsuccessful leader? We examine leadership promotion and performance in Wikipedia, a prominent open collaboration community. This study extends previous work on governance and leadership by developing and validating a more complete measurement model of leadership performance in an open collaboration community, and proposing a testable model of leadership promotion and performance within this context

Matching People And Groups: Recruitment And Selection In Online Games

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) have great potential as sites for research within the social and behavioral sciences and human-computer interaction. This is because “guilds” — semi-persistent groups in online games — are much like groups in real organizations. In this paper, we examine how groups and individuals find appropriate matches and whether appropriate matches lead newcomers to stay longer in their groups in an online game environment. Results from archival data, observation, and survey in the game World of Warcraft (WoW) indicate that different selection methods lead to person-group fit for social and task-oriented characteristics and good fit leads recruits to stay longer in their group. In particular, recruitment of new members to task-oriented guilds was most successful when brief interactions were used whereas recruitment to social-oriented guilds was most successful when probationary periods and referrals were used

Trust Across Borders: Buyer-Supplier Trust in Global Business-to-Business E-Commerce

This study focuses on trust formation and development in global buyer-supplier relationships. Trust affects all business relationships, especially global business-to-business (B2B) transactions due to the distances between buyers and suppliers. We use information signaling theory to examine how information indices and signals affect buyers’ trust in suppliers in global B2B commerce. Specifically, we examine how buyers’ trust is affected by (1) their perceptions of the national integrity and legal structure of suppliers’ country, and (2) third-party verifications of suppliers on B2B exchanges. Because buyer-supplier relationships usually evolve over time, we study how the effects of indices and signals change as the number of transactions between the partners increases. A survey of global organizational buyers finds that perceptions of national integrity, legal structure, and supplier verifications are all positively related to buyers’ trust. However, the number of prior transactions between buyers and suppliers moderates the impact of perceived legal structure on buyers’ trust

Talk, Trust and Telecommunications: Alternative Mechanisms for Coordinating Commercial Transactions

Much of the prior work on electronic commerce has used transaction cost economics and coordination theory as general frameworks. These models call attention to the problem of understanding how organizations accomplish effective coordination in complex environments. Applying these models to electronic commerce requires that the processes involved be identified and described. Recent research considering the use of networks focuses on models of commercial exchanges which include activities such as search, execution, settlement, monitoring and after sales services