Aaron D. Shaw

The future of crowd work

Paid crowd work offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale. But it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential, focusing on assembly-line piecework. Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate? This paper frames the major challenges that stand in the way of this goal. Drawing on theory from organizational behavior and distributed computing, as well as direct feedback from workers, we outline a framework that will enable crowd work that is complex, collaborative, and sustainable. The framework lays out research challenges in twelve major areas: workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, real-time response, synchronous collaboration, quality control, crowds guiding AIs, AIs guiding crowds, platforms, job design, reputation, and motivation.

Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia

Despite the egalitarian rhetoric surrounding online cultural production, profound gender inequalities remain in who contributes to one of the most visited Web sites worldwide, Wikipedia. In analyzing this persistent disparity, previous research has focused on aspects of current contributors and the existing Wikipedia community. We draw on unique panel survey data of young adults with information about both Wikipedia contributors and non-contributors. We examine the role of peoples background attributes and Internet skills in participation on the site. We find that the gender gap in editing is exacerbated by a similarly significant Internet skills gap. Our results show that the most likely contributors are high-skilled males and that among low-skilled Internet users no gender gap in Wikipedia contributions exists. Our findings suggest that efforts to understand the gender gap must also take Internet skills into account.

Computer supported collective action

Social media has become globally ubiquitous, transforming how people are networked and mobilized. This forum explores research and applications of these new networked publics at individual, organizational, and societal levels. ---Shelly Farnham, Editor

Page protection: another missing dimension of Wikipedia research

Page protection is a feature of wiki software that allows administrators to restrict contributions to particular pages. For example, pages are frequently protected so that they can only be edited by administrators. Page protection affects tens of thousands of pages in English Wikipedia and renders many of Wikipedias most visible pages uneditable by the vast majority of visitors. That said, page protection has attracted very little attention and is rarely taken into account by researchers. This note describes page protection and illustrates why it plays an important role in shaping user behavior on wikis. We also present a new longitudinal dataset of page protection events for English Wikipedia, the software used to produce it, and results from tests that support both the validity of the dataset and the impact of page protection on patterns of editing.

Consider the Redirect: A Missing Dimension of Wikipedia Research

Redirects are special pages in wikis that silently transport visitors to other pages. Although redirects make up a majority of all article pages in English Wikipedia, they have attracted very little attention and are rarely taken into account by researchers. This note describes redirects and illustrates why they play an important role in shaping activity in Wikipedia. We also present a novel longitudinal dataset of redirects for English Wikipedia and the software used to produce it. Using this dataset, we revisit several important published findings about Wikipedia to show that accounting for redirects can have important effects on research.

Starting Online Communities: Motivations and Goals of Wiki Founders

Why do people start new online communities? Previous research has studied what helps communities to grow and what motivates contributors, but the reasons that people create new communities in the first place remain unclear. We present the results of a survey of over 300 founders of new communities on the online wiki hosting site Wikia.com. We analyze the motivations and goals of wiki creators, finding that founders have diverse reasons for starting wikis and diverse ways of defining their success. Many founders see their communities as occupying narrow topics, and neither seek nor expect a large group of contributors. We also find that founders with differing goals approach community building differently. We argue that community platform designers can create interfaces that support the diverse goals of founders more effectively.

Talking About Talk: Coordination in Large Online Communities

Social computing systems and online communities develop varying strategies for managing collaborative processes such as consensus building, task delegation, and conflict management. Although these factors impact both the ways in which communities produce content and the content they produce, little prior work has undertaken a large comparative analysis of coordination dynamics across linguistically diverse communities engaged in the same activity. We describe and model the coordination processes of Wikipedia editors across the 24 largest language editions. Our results indicate that language edition is associated with a difference in quantity of coordination activity, as measured by talk page posts, with increases as high as 60% when compared against pages in English.

Effects of a Wikipedia Orientation Game on New User Edits

Socializing new users into a community that has a complicated set of norms and practices often presents a large challenge for peer production projects such as Wikipedia. Failure to do so successfully leads to confusion and alienation amongst newcomers. The authors present The Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive game that orients new users on Wikipedia in the basics of editing. We estimate the effect that inviting new users to play this game has on their subsequent contribution levels in Wikipedia, and find that overall, users invited to play The Wikipedia Adventure contributed more edits to talk pages.

Density Dependence Without Resource Partitioning: Population Ecology on Change.org

E-petitioning is a prominent form of Internet-based collective action. We apply theories from organizational population ecology to investigate whether similar petitions compete for signatures. We use latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling to identify topical niches. Using these niches, we test two theories from population ecology on 442,109 Change.org petitions. First, we find evidence for density dependence, an inverse-U-shaped relationship between the density of a petitions niche and the number of signatures the petition obtains. This suggests e-petitioning is competitive and that e-petitions draw on overlapping resource pools. Second, although resource partitioning theory predicts that topically specialized petitions will obtain more signatures in concentrated populations, we find no evidence of this. This suggests that specialists struggle to avoid competition with generalists.

Evaluating Open Collaboration Opportunities in the Fire Service with FireCrowd

In emergency response organizations like the fire service, personnel require easy access to reliable, up-to-date safety protocols. Systems for creating and managing Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) within these command and control organizations are often rigid, inaccessible, and siloed. Open collaboration systems like wikis and social computing tools have the potential to address these limitations, but have not been analyzed for intra-organizational use in emergency services. In response to a request from the Fire Protection Research Foundation (FPRF) we evaluated a high-fidelity open collaboration system prototype, FireCrowd, that was designed to manage SOPs within the U.S. fire service. We use the prototype as a technology probe and apply human-centered design methods in a suburban fire department in the Chicago area. We find that organizational factors would inhibit the adoption of some open collaboration practices and identify points in current practices that offer opportunities for open collaboration in the future.