Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia

Subscribe (Full Service)


	Search: The ACM Digital Library The Guide

	Feedback

Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination

Full text

Pdf (843 KB)

Source

Computer Supported Cooperative Work archive
Proceedings of the ACM 2008 conference on Computer supported cooperative work table of contents

San Diego, CA, USA

SESSION: Coordination and Wikipedia table of contents

Pages 37-46

Year of Publication: 2008

ISBN:978-1-60558-007-4

Authors

Aniket Kittur	Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Robert E. Kraut	Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Sponsors

ACM: Association for Computing Machinery
SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 72, Downloads (12 Months): 404, Citation Count: 0

Additional Information:

abstract references cited by index terms collaborative colleagues

Tools and Actions:	Request Permissions Review this Article Save this Article to a Binder Display Formats: BibTeX EndNote ACM Ref

DOI Bookmark:	Use this link to bookmark this Article: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1460563.1460572 What is a DOI?

ABSTRACT

Wikipedia's success is often attributed to the large numbers of contributors who improve the accuracy, completeness and clarity of articles while reducing bias. However, because of the coordination needed to write an article collaboratively, adding contributors is costly. We examined how the number of editors in Wikipedia and the coordination methods they use affect article quality. We distinguish between explicit coordination, in which editors plan the article through communication, and implicit coordination, in which a subset of editors structure the work by doing the majority of it. Adding more editors to an article improved article quality only when they used appropriate coordination techniques and was harmful when they did not. Implicit coordination through concentrating the work was more helpful when many editors contributed, but explicit coordination through communication was not. Both types of coordination improved quality more when an article was in a formative stage. These results demonstrate the critical importance of coordination in effectively harnessing the "wisdom of the crowd" in online production environments.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

	1	Aiken, L. and West, S. Multiple regression: Testing and interpreting interactions. Sage, CA (1991).
	2	Atkinson, A. B. On the measurement of inequality. Journal of Economic Theory, 2 (1970), 244--263.
	3	Berg, J. E., Forsythe, R., & Rietz, T. A. The Iowa electronic market. In Blackwell Encyclopedic Dictionary of Finance, Blackwell, Oxford UK (1997).
	4	Benkler, Y. Coase's penguin, or Linux and the nature of the firm. Yale Law Journal, 112 (2002), 367--445.
	5	Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., The mythical man-month (anniversary ed.), Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1995
	6	Cohen, J., Cohen, P., West, S. G., & Aiken, L. S. Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey (2003).
	7	Galton, F. Vox populi. Nature, 75 (1907), 7.
	8	Giles, G. Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature, 438 (2005), 900--901.
	9	Hadoop Project. http://lucene.apache.org/hadoop/.
	10	Heckman, J. Sample selection bias as a specification error. Econometrica, 47, 1 (1979), 153--162.
	11	Hill, G. W. Group versus individual performance. Are n + 1 heads better than one? Psychological Bulletin, 91 (1982), 517--539.
	12	Hinsz, V. B., Tindale, R. S., & Vollrath, D. A. The emerging conceptualization of groups as information processors. Psychological Bulletin, 121, 1 (1997), 43--64.
	13	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_1.0_assessments
	14	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Stub
	15	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Version_1.0_Editorial_Team/Assessment
	16	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WIAFA
	17	Kanefsky, B., Barlow, N.G., & Gulick, V.C. Can Distributed Volunteers Accomplish Massive Data Analysis Tasks? Lunar and Planetary Science (2001).
	18	Katz, R., & Tushman, M. Communication patterns, project performance, and task characteristics: An empirical evaluation and integration in an R&D setting. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 23, (1979) 139--162.
	19	Aniket Kittur , Bongwon Suh , Bryan A. Pendleton , Ed H. Chi, He says, she says: conflict and coordination in Wikipedia, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 28-May 03, 2007, San Jose, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1240624.1240698]
	20	Aniket Kittur , Ed H. Chi , Bongwon Suh, Crowdsourcing user studies with Mechanical Turk, Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2008, Florence, Italy [doi>10.1145/1357054.1357127]
	21	Kittur, A., Chi, E., Pendleton, B. A., Suh, B., & Mytkowicz, T. Power of the few vs. wisdom of the crowd: Wikipedia and the rise of the bourgeoisie. Alt.CHI, 2007, San Jose, CA (2007).
	22	Laughlin, P. R., VanderStoep, S. W., & Hollingshead, A. B. Collective versus individual induction: Recognition of truth, rejection of error, and collective information processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 1 (1991), 50--67.
	23	Leavitt, H. Some effects of certain communication patterns on group performance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 46 (1951), 38--50.
	24	Thomas W. Malone, Modeling coordination in organizations and markets, Management Science, v.33 n.10, p.1317-1332, October 1, 1987 [doi>10.1287/mnsc.33.10.1317]
	25	March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. Organizations. New York: Wiley (1958).
	26	Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), v.11 n.3, p.309-346, July 2002 [doi>10.1145/567793.567795]
	27	Reid Priedhorsky , Jilin Chen , Shyong (Tony) K. Lam , Katherine Panciera , Loren Terveen , John Riedl, Creating, destroying, and restoring value in wikipedia, Proceedings of the 2007 international ACM conference on Supporting group work, November 04-07, 2007, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/1316624.1316663]
	28	Rouse, W.B., Cannon-Bowers, J. A., & Salas, E. The role of mental models in team performance in complex systems. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 22 (1992) 1296--1308.
	29	Shepperd, J. A. Productivity loss in performance groups: A motivation analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 113, 1 (1993), 67--81.
	30	Steiner, I. D. Group process and productivity. New York: Academic Press (1972).
	31	Stvilia, B., Twidale, M. B., Smith, L. C., & Gasser, L. Assessing information quality of a community-based encyclopedia. In Proc. ICIQ (2005), 442--454.
	32	James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds, Anchor, 2005
	33	Thompson, J. Organizations in action. New York: McGraw-Hill (1967).
	34	Tushman, M. Work characteristics and subunit communication structure: A contingency analysis. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24, (1979), 82--98.
	35	Van de Ven, A. H., Delbecq, A. L., & Koenig, R., Jr. Determinants of coordination modes within organizations. American Sociological Review, 41 (1967), 322--338.
	36	Fernanda B. Viégas , Martin Wattenberg , Kushal Dave, Studying cooperation and conflict between authors with history flow visualizations, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.575-582, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985765]
	37	Viégas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., Kriss, J., & van Ham, F. Talk before you type: Coordination in Wikipedia. HICSS (2007).
	38	Viégas, F. B., Wattenberg, M., & McKeon, M. M. The hidden order of Wikipedia. In HCII (2007).
	39	Wilkinson, D. M., & Huberman, B. A. Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia. First Monday, 12, 4 (2007).
	40	Wittenbaum, G. W., Vaughan, S. I., & Stasser, G. Coordination in task-performing groups. In Theory and research on small groups, Plenum Press, NY (1998).