Jonathan T. Morgan

The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System How Wikipedia’s Reaction to Popularity Is Causing Its Decline

Open collaboration systems, such as Wikipedia, need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This article presents data that show how several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Furthermore, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes—especially changes proposed by newer editors.

Supporting reflective public thought with considerit

We present a novel platform for supporting public deliberation on difficult decisions. ConsiderIt guides people to reflect on tradeoffs and the perspectives of others by framing interactions around pro/con points that participants create, adopt, and share. ConsiderIt surfaces the most salient pros and cons overall, while also enabling users to drill down into the key points for different groups. We deployed ConsiderIt in a contentious U.S. state election, inviting residents to deliberate on nine ballot measures. We discuss ConsiderIts affordances and limitations, enriched with empirical data from this deployment. We show that users often engaged in normatively desirable activities, such as crafting positions that recognize both pros and cons, as well as points written by people who do not agree with them.

Tea and sympathy: crafting positive new user experiences on wikipedia

We present the Teahouse, a pilot project for supporting and socializing new Wikipedia editors. Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia must continually recruit and retain new members in order to sustain themselves. Wikipedias editor decline presents unique exigency for evaluating novel strategies to support newcomers and increase new user retention in such systems, particularly among demographics that are currently underrepresented in the user community. In this paper, we describe the design and deployment of Teahouse, and present preliminary findings. Our findings highlight the importance of intervening early in the editor lifecycle, providing user-friendly tools, creating safe spaces for newcomers, and facilitating positive interactions between newcomers and established community members.

Is this what you meant?: promoting listening on the web with reflect

A lack of support for active listening undermines discussion and deliberation on the web. We contribute a design frame identifying potential improvements to web discussion were listening more explicitly encouraged in interfaces. We explore these concepts through a novel interface, Reflect, that creates a space next to every comment where others can summarize the points they hear the commenter making. Deployments on Slashdot, Wikimedias Strategic Planning Initiative, and a local civic effort suggest that interfaces for listening may have traction for general use on the web.

Facilitating Diverse Political Engagement with the Living Voters Guide

ABSTRACT Unlike 20th-century mass media, the Internet requires self-selection of content by its very nature. This has raised the normative concern that users may opt to encounter only political information and perspectives that accord with their pre-existing views. This study examines the different ways that voters appropriated a new, purpose-built online engagement platform to engage with a wide variety of political opinions and arguments. In a system aimed at helping Washington state citizens make their 2010 election decisions, we find that users take significant advantage of three key opportunities to engage with political diversity: accessing, considering, and producing arguments on both sides of various policy proposals. Notably, engagement with each of these forms of participation drops off as the required level of commitment increases. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results as well as directions for future research.

Editing beyond articles: diversity & dynamics of teamwork in open collaborations

We report a study of Wikipedia in which we use a mixed-methods approach to understand how participation in specialized workgroups called WikiProjects has changed over the life of the encyclopedia. While previous work has analyzed the work of WikiProjects in supporting the development of articles within particular subject domains, the collaborative role of WikiProjects that do not fit this conventional mold has not been empirically examined. We combine content analysis, interviews and analysis of edit logs to identify and characterize these alternative WikiProjects and the work they do. Our findings suggest that WikiProject participation reflects community concerns and shifts in the communitys conception of valued work over the past six years. We discuss implications for other open collaborations that need flexible, adaptable coordination mechanisms to support a range of content creation, curation and community maintenance tasks.

Negotiating with angry mastodons: the wikipedia policy environment as genre ecology

Groups collaborating in online spaces on complex, extended projects develop behavioral conventions and agreed-upon practices to structure and regulate their interactions and work. Collaborators on Wikipedia have developed a multi-tiered policy environment to document a set of evolving principles, processes, and rules to facilitate productive group collaboration. Previous quantitative studies have noted this hierarchical structure, but have evaluated the policy environment as a singular entity rather than investigating potential differences between the three main regulatory genres that enable it. These studies also excluded essays, the least official regulatory genre, from their analyses. We perform a comparative content analysis of all three genres (policies, guidelines, and essays) and demonstrate that they focus on different areas of community regulation. Drawing on the theory of genre ecologies we discuss the possible role of unofficial genres such as essays in articulating and regulating work practices in online, organized collaborative work.

Project talk: coordination work and group membership in WikiProjects

WikiProjects have contributed to Wikipedias success in important ways, yet the range of work that WikiProjects perform and the way they coordinate that work remains largely unexplored. In this study, we perform a content analysis of 788 work-related discussions from the talk pages of 138 WikiProjects in order to understand the role WikiProjects play in collaborative work on Wikipedia. We find that the editors use WikiProjects to coordinate a wide variety of work activities beyond content production and that non-members play an active role in that work. Our research suggests that WikiProject collaboration is less structured and more open than that of many virtual teams and that WikiProjects may function more like FLOSS projects than traditional groups.

A content analysis of wikiproject discussions: toward a typology of coordination language used by virtual teams

Understanding the role of explicit coordination in virtual teams allows for a more meaningful understanding of how people work together online. We describe a new content analysis for classifying discussions within Wikipedia WikiProject - voluntary, self-directed teams of editors - present preliminary findings, and discuss potential applications and future research directions.

What i know is...: establishing credibility on Wikipedia talk pages

This poster presents a new theoretical framework and research method for studying the relationship between specific types of authority claims and the attempts of contributors to establish credibility in online, collaborative environments. We describe a content analysis method for coding authority claims based on linguistic and rhetorical cues in naturally occurring, text-based discourse. We present results from a preliminary analysis of a sample of Wikipedia talk page discussions focused on recent news events. This method provides a novel framework for capturing and understanding these persuasion-oriented behaviors, and shows potential as a tool for online communication research, including automated text analysis using trained natural language processing systems.