Your process is showing: controversy management and perceived quality in wikipedia

  • Authors:
  • W. Ben Towne;Aniket Kittur;Peter Kinnaird;James Herbsleb

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Large-scale collaboration systems often separate their content from the deliberation around how that content was produced. Surfacing this deliberation may engender trust in the content generation process if the deliberation process appears fair, well-reasoned, and thorough. Alternatively, it could encourage doubts about content quality, especially if the process appears messy or biased. In this paper we report the results of an experiment where we found that surfacing deliberation generally led to decreases in perceptions of quality for the article under consideration, especially - but not only - if the discussion revealed conflict. The effect size depends on the type of editors' interactions. Finally, this decrease in actual article quality rating was accompanied by self-reported improved perceptions of the article and Wikipedia overall.