Cumulative Experience and Recent Behavior and their Relation to Content Quality on Wikipedia

Abstract

Research highlights Recent behavior a more powerful predictor than cumulative experience as a user characteristic that impact on content quality  Recent behavior in editing high quality articles impact content quality  Integrated users in the community have a higher impact on content quality ABSTRACTCumulative experience is often seen as a major factor for influencing content quality in collaborative projects such as Wikipedia. However, past studies often utilize cumulative experience based on the quantity of work rather than quality and context. Moreover, the perspective on cumulative experience assumes a final destination for user behavior, whereas much of the literature indicates that user behavior changes over time. This paper aims to address these two factors by providing better descriptions and context to determine their effect on content quality. The study rematerialized these factors based on Cumulative experience and recent behavior and their relation to content quality on WikipediaResearch highlights  Recent behavior is a more powerful predictor than cumulative experience as a user characteristic that impacts content quality  Recent behavior in editing high quality articles impacts content quality  Integrated users in the community have a higher impact on content quality ABSTRACTCumulative experience is often seen as a major factor for influencing content quality in collaborative projects such as Wikipedia. However, past studies often utilize cumulative experience based on the quantity of work rather than quality and context. Moreover, the perspective on cumulative experience assumes a final destination for user behavior, whereas much of the literature indicates that user behavior changes over time. This paper aims to address these two factors by providing better descriptions and context to determine their effect on content quality. The study rematerialized these factors based on the quality of work and built a comprehensive model of how article quality materializes through groups of users. Regression models in this study indicate that recent behavior is a more powerful predictor of content quality change than cumulative experience. The implications of the findings impact the design of task-routing systems as well as designers and group managers' work in collaborative projects.

Crowd Development

“…Numerous researches have been dedicated to understanding how groups behave over time and how their dynamics affect their performance [9,11,21,38,43,62]. Among these, few recognize that the behavior of groups fundamentally changes just prior to an evaluation period [17,38] or more generally over time [33,59]. Most of these models are based on Gersick's punctuated equilibrium [22,23], which suggests three stages of group development.…”

“…An important part of being successful in promoting an article to GA is to be familiar with Wikipedia's reviewing procedures and content policies. We measure the GA experience of an article's editors through the extent to which the editors have had experience editing articles that eventually are promoted to GA. That is, experience is measured not by only the quantity of work editors have contributed, but also by the quality of their work, which has been found to be predictive of future article quality [59]. Because we know that not all editors contribute equally to an article, we weight the fraction of experienced editors by their contribution to the focal article as well as their contributions to other articles that are eventually promoted to GA.…”