Wikidatians are Born: Paths to Full Participation in a Collaborative Structured Knowledge Base

Abstract

We investigated how participation evolves in Wikidata as its editors become established members of the community. Originally conceived to support Wikipedia, Wikidata is a collaborative structured knowledge base, created and maintained by a large number of volunteers, whose data can be freely reused in other contexts. Just like in any other online social environment, understanding its contributors' pathways to full participation helps Wikidata improve user experience and retention. We analysed how participation changes in time under the frameworks of legitimate peripheral participation and activity theory. We found out that as they engage more with the project, "Wikidatians" acquire a higher sense of responsibility for their work, interact more with the community, take on more advanced tasks, and use a wider range of tools. Previous activity in Wikipedia has varied effects. As Wikidata is a young community, future work should focus on volunteers with little or no experience in similar projects and specify means to improve critical aspects such as engagement and data quality.

Provenance Information in a Collaborative Knowledge Graph: An Evaluation of Wikidata External References

“…The distribution of author and publisher types for references did not match Wikipedia [9], despite the partial overlap of the two communities [20]. Almost no news sources are used as sources in Wikidata, compared to the online encyclopedia.…”

“…While most work around Wikidata focuses on the quality of its triples [4] or analyses its community dynamics [20], to the best of our knowledge no studies have investigated provenance quality. Little is known about the quality of the sources included to support claims, although this is a key issue for Wikidata.…”

What Makes a Good Collaborative Knowledge Graph: Group Composition and Quality in Wikidata

“…Concerning tenure, previous work [24] has shown that Wikidata editors change the focus and scope of their activity as they gain experience within the system. This suggests that users with different levels of experience may bring complementary skills in building high-quality items.…”

“…This suggests that users with different levels of experience may bring complementary skills in building high-quality items. Editor activity may also vary along their edit scope [24]. Some users carry out similar tasks, i.e.…”

“…tenure and interest diversity. These two variables were chosen due to the variations in activity across different levels of experience and different tasks reported by Wikidata editors in previous work [24].…”