Coordinating tasks on the commons: designing for personal goals, expertise and serendipity

  • Authors:

  • Michel Krieger;Emily Margarete Stark;Scott R. Klemmer

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

How is work created, assigned, and completed on large-scale, crowd-powered systems like Wikipedia? And what design principles might enable these federated online systems to be more effective? This paper reports on a qualitative study of work and task practices on Wikipedia. Despite the availability of tag-based community-wide task assignment mechanisms, informants reported that self-directed goals, within-topic expertise, and fortuitous discovery are more frequently used than community-tagged tasks. We examine how Wikipedia editors organize their actions and the actions of other participants, and what implications this has for understanding, and building tools for, crowd-powered systems, or any web site where the main force of production comes from a crowd of online participants. From these observations and insights, we developed WikiTasks, a tool that integrates with Wikipedia and supports both grassroots creation of site-wide tasks and self-selection of personal tasks, accepted from this larger pool of community tasks.