Value Production in a Collaborative Environment

Abstract

We review some recent endeavors and add some new results to characterize and understand underlying mechanisms in Wikipedia (WP), the paradigmatic example of collaborative value production. We analyzed the statistics of editorial activity in different languages and observed typical circadian and weekly patterns, which enabled us to estimate the geographical origins of contributions to WPs in languages spoken in several time zones. Using a recently introduced measure we showed that the editorial activities have intrinsic dependencies in the burstiness of events. A comparison of the English and Simple English WPs revealed important aspects of language complexity and showed how peer cooperation solved the task of enhancing readability. One of our focus issues was characterizing the conflicts or edit wars in WPs, which helped us to automatically filter out controversial pages. When studying the temporal evolution of the controversiality of such pages we identified typical patterns and classified conflicts accordingly. Our quantitative analysis provides the basis of modeling conflicts and their resolution in collaborative environments and contribute to the understanding of this issue, which becomes increasingly important with the development of information communication technology.

The People’s Encyclopedia Under the Gaze of the Sages: A Systematic Review of Scholarly Research on Wikipedia

“…Moreover, his organizing framework of Wikipedia research as an input-process-output model provides an alternate and valuable lens from which to consider the body of research. Yasseri and Kertész (2012) adopted an even narrower approach to reviewing Wikipedia studies than the others we have described: they restricted their focus to studies of participation in Wikipedia that adopted qu n ve mo es o n lys s, wh ch hey c ll "compu on l soc l sc ence". They eg n w h gene l overview of Wikipedia for new researchers, briefly describing the Wikipedia articles, the Wikipedian commun y, n " ccesso es", y wh ch hey me n pol c es, lk p ges, c ego es, n o he nc ll y pages.…”

“…Lin 2006;Poderi 2009;Muller-Seitz & Reger 2009;Ha & Y.-H. Kim 2009;Pfeil et al 2006;Kaplan & Haenlein 2010;Mattus 2008;de Laat 2010;Yasseri & Kertész 2012;Kimmons 2011). In addition, Wilkinson and Huberman (2007b) is covered by Medelyan et al (2009).…”

“…Moreover, a literature review that we described earlier reviews studies on Wikipedia participation trends in considerable depth (Yasseri & Kertész 2012).…”

Modeling Dynamics of Wikipedia: An Empirical Analysis Using a Vector Error Correction Model

“…Its unprecedented success has posed challenges to traditional theories of public goods and collective-action, which has inspired many scholars from various fields to study it [1,2]. Existing research highlights many factors that are crucial to the success of Wikipedia, including topic popularity, group size, collaborative conflict, coordination mechanism, and information quality, etc [3].…”

Wikipedia editing dynamics

“…The editing of Wikipedia (WP) is one of these sources of probabilistic outcome [2]. Some effort has already been put into attempts to understand the evolution of WP as a network, with pages or topics as nodes and links between them as edges [3][4][5][6].…”