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

Crowd Development: The Interplay between Crowd Evaluation and Collaborative Dynamics in Wikipedia

Collaborative crowdsourcing is an increasingly common way of accomplishing work in our economy. Yet, we know very little about how the behavior of these crowds changes over time and how these dynamics impact their performance. In this paper, we take a group development approach that considers how the behavior of crowds change over time in anticipation and as a result of their evaluation and recognition. Towards this goal, this paper studies the collaborative behavior of groups comprised of editors of articles that have been recognized for their outstanding quality and given the Good Articles (GA) status and those that eventually become Featured Articles (FA) on Wikipedia. The results show that the collaborative behavior of GA groups radically changes just prior to their nomination. In particular, the GA groups experience increases in the level of activity, centralization of workload, and level of GA experience and decreases in conflict (i.e., reverts) among editors. After being promoted to GA, they converge back to their typical behavior and composition. This indicates that crowd behavior prior to their evaluation period is dramatically different than behavior before or after. In addition, the collaborative behaviors of crowds during their promotion to GA are predictive of whether they are eventually promoted to FA. Our findings shed new light on the importance of time in understanding the relationship between crowd performance and collaborative measures such as centralization, conflict and experience.National Science Foundation under Grant No. IIS-1617820Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138122/1/Zhang et al. 2017.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138122/4/a119-zhang.pdfDescription of a119-zhang.pdf : Published 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 censorship 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