Cooperation and quality in wikipedia

ABSTRACT

The rise of the Internet has enabled collaboration and cooperation on anunprecedentedly large scale. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which presently comprises 7.2 million articles created by 7.04 million distinct editors, provides a consummate example. We examined all 50 million edits made tothe 1.5 million English-language Wikipedia articles and found that the high-quality articles are distinguished by a marked increase in number of edits, number of editors, and intensity of cooperative behavior, as compared to other articles of similar visibility and age. This is significant because in other domains, fruitful cooperation has proven to be difficult to sustain as the size of the collaboration increases. Furthermore, in spite of the vagaries of human behavior, we show that Wikipedia articles accrete edits according to a simple stochastic mechanism in which edits beget edits. Topics of high interest or relevance are thus naturally brought to the forefront of quality.

REFERENCES

• 1: T. J. Allen. Studies of the problem solving process in engineering. IEEE Trans. Engineering Management, EM-13(2):72--83, 1966.
• 2: K. N. Berk. A central limit theorem for m-dependent random variables with unbounded m. Ann. Prob., 1(2):352--354, 1973.
• 3: Fred P. Brooks, Jr., The Mythical Man-Month, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, v.10 n.6, p.193, June 1975
• 4: Luciana S. Buriol , Carlos Castillo , Debora Donato , Stefano Leonardi , Stefano Millozzi, Temporal Analysis of the Wikigraph, Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence, p.45-51, December 18-22, 2006 [doi>10.1109/WI.2006.164]
• 5: A. Capocci, V. Servidio, F. Colaiori, L. Buriol, D. Donato, S. Leonardi, and G. Caldarelli. Preferential attachment in the growth of social networks: the case of Wikipedia. Phys. Rev. E, 74:036116, 2006.
• 6: T. Chesney. An empirical examination of Wikipedias credibility. First Monday, 11(11), 2006.
• 7: Scott Clearwater, Bernardo Huberman, and Tad Hogg. Cooperative solution of constraint satisfaction problems. Science, 254(5035):1181--1183, 1991.
• 8: H. Crawford. Encyclopedias. In R. Bopp and L. C. Smith, editors, Reference and information services: an introduction, 3rd ed., pages 433--459, Englewood, CO, 2001. Libraries Unlimited.
• 9: A. Desilets, S. Paquet, and N. Vinson. Are wikis usable? In Proc. ACM Wikisym, 2006.
• 10: Editorial. Britannica attacks... and we respond. Nature, 440, 2006.
• 11: William Emigh , Susan C. Herring, Collaborative Authoring on the Web: A Genre Analysis of Online Encyclopedias, Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'05) - Track 4, p.99.1, January 03-06, 2005 [doi>10.1109/HICSS.2005.149]
• 12: Encyclopaedia Britannica. Fatally flawed: refuting the recent study on encyclopedic accuracy by the journal Nature, March 2006.
• 13: Jim Giles. Internet encyclopaedias go head to head. Nature, 438:900--901, 2005.
• 14: N. Glance and B. A. Huberman. The dynamics of social dilemmas. Scientific American, March 1994.
• 15: B. A. Huberman and L. Adamic. Growth dynamics of the World Wide Web. Nature, 401:131, 1999.
• 16: A. Kittur, E. Chi, A. Pendleton, B. Suh, and T. Mytkowicz. Power of the few vs. wisdom of the crowd: Wikipedia and the rise of the bourgeoisie. submitted for publication.
• 17: Cliff Lampe , Paul Resnick, Slash(dot) and burn: distributed moderation in a large online conversation space, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.543-550, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985761]
• 18: B. Leuf and W. Cunningham. The Wiki Way. Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2001.
• 19: A. Lih. Wikipedia as participatory journalism. In Proc. 5th International Symposium on Online Journalism, austin, TX, 2004.
• 20: E. Da Lio, L. Fraboni, and T. Leo. Twiki-based facilitation in a newly formed academic community of practice. In Proc. ACM Wikisym, 2006.
• 21: Ann Majchrzak , Christian Wagner , Dave Yates, Corporate wiki users: results of a survey, Proceedings of the 2006 international symposium on Wikis, August 21-23, 2006, Odense, Denmark [doi>10.1145/1149453.1149472]
• 22: U. Pfeil, P. Zaphiris, and C. S. Ang. Cultural differences in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. J. Computer-mediated Comm., 12(1), 2006.
• 23: J. M. Reagle. A case of mutual aid: Wikipedia, politeness and perspective taking. In Proc. Wikimania, 2005.
• 24: J. Rice. Mathematical Statistics and Data Analysis. Duxbury Press, Belmont, CA, 2nd edition, 1995.
• 25: D. Riehle. How and why Wikipedia works: an interview. In Proc. ACM Wikisym, 2005.
• 26: S. M. Ross. Stochastic processes. John Wiley, New York, 1996.
• 27: D. Smith, J. Onnela, and N. Johnson. Accelerating networks. preprint.
• 28: A. Spoerri. What is popular on Wikipedia and why? First Monday, 12(4), 2007.
• 29: B. Stvilia, M. B. Twidale, L. C. Smith, and L. Gasser. Information quality work organization in wikipedia. preprint.
• 30: B. Stvilia, M. B. Twidale, L. C. Smith, and L. Gasser. Assessing information quality of a community-based encyclopedia. In Proc. ICIQ 2005, pages 442--454, Cambridge, MA, 2005.
• 31: 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]
• 32: Fernanda B. Viegas , Martin Wattenberg , Jesse Kriss , Frank van Ham, Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia, Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, p.78, January 03-06, 2007 [doi>10.1109/HICSS.2007.511]
• 33: J. Voss. Measuring Wikipedia. In Proc. ISSI 2005, Stockholm, 2005.
• 34: V. Zlotic, M. Bozicevic, H. Stefanic, and M. Domazet. Wikipedias: Collaborative web-based encylopedias as complex networks. Phys. Rev. E, 74, 2006.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces
          Subjects: Theory and models; Web-based interaction

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.4 COMPUTERS AND SOCIETY
      K.4.3 Organizational Impacts
          Subjects: Computer-supported collaborative work

General Terms:
Human Factors

Keywords:
Wikipedia, collaborative authoring, cooperation, groupware