Searching for the goldilocks zone: trade-offs in managing online volunteer groups

Authors:
Loxley Sijia Wang;Jilin Chen;Yuqing Ren;John Riedl
Affiliations:
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA;University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA;University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA;University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Year:
2012

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Abstract

Dedicated and productive members who actively contribute to community efforts are crucial to the success of online volunteer groups such as Wikipedia. What predicts member productivity? Do productive members stay longer? How does involvement in multiple projects affect member contribution to the community? In this paper, we analyze data from 648 WikiProjects to address these questions. Our results reveal two critical trade-offs in managing online volunteer groups. First, factors that increase member productivity, measured by the number of edits on Wikipedia articles, also increase likelihood of withdrawal from contributing, perhaps due to feelings of mission accomplished or burnout. Second, individual membership in multiple projects has mixed effects. It decreases the amount of work editors contribute to both the individual projects and Wikipedia as a whole. It increases withdrawal for each individual project yet reduces withdrawal from Wikipedia. We discuss how our findings expand existing theories to fit the online context and inform the design of new tools to improve online volunteer work.