Social capital increases efficiency of collaboration among Wikipedia editors

Abstract

In this study we measure the impact of pre-existing social capital on the efficiency of collaboration among Wikipedia editors. To construct a social network among Wikipedians we look to mutual interaction on the user talk pages of Wikipedia editors. As our data set, we analyze the communication networks associated with 3085 featured articles -the articles of highest quality in the English Wikipedia, comparing it to the networks of 80154 articles of lower quality. As the metric to assess the quality of collaboration, we measure the time of quality promotion from when an article is started until it is promoted to featured article.The study finds that the higher pre-existing social capital of editors working on an article is, the faster the articles they work on reach higher quality status, such as featured articles. The more cohesive and more centralized the collaboration network, and the more network members were already collaborating before starting to work together on an article, the faster the article they work on will be promoted or featured.

Measuring Quality of Collaboratively Edited Documents: The Case of Wikipedia

“…The result was confirmed in German Wikipedia [17]. The social capital of the editors could also affect the quality of the articles they contributed [18]. Recently, Suzuki applied the idea of using h-index on academic ranking for assessing the quality of an article [19].…”

Recent Developments and Future Trends in Volunteered Geographic Information Research: The Case of OpenStreetMap

“…The assumption behind Linus' Law is that with the number of contributors, the quality of the product increases, an assumption which has been proven for Wikipedia, where the quality of an article increases with the number of contributors who work on it [107][108][109]. While Haklay et al [110] found that the law generally applies to OSM positional accuracy, Mooney and Corcoran [111,112] could not identify a similar pattern when analyzing heavily edited objects in OSM.…”

The influence of network structures of Wikipedia discussion pages on the efficiency of WikiProjects

“…Zhu et al (2011) found strong evidence of shared leadership in Wikipedia, with editors in peripheral roles producing a large proportion of leadership behaviors. Nemoto et al (2011) examined the influence of pre-existing social capital on the efficiency of collaboration among Wikipedia editors, and found that higher social capital helps improve the efficiency of editors. While these studies shed light on important aspects that affect the success of peer production systems, a major limitation of these studies is that they fail to consider the broader social environment in which project participants coordinate and collaborate.…”