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

  • Authors:

  • Jonathan T. Morgan;Michael Gilbert;David W. McDonald;Mark Zachry

  • Affiliations:

  • Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco, CA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA;University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
  • Year:
  • 2014

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Abstract

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 community's 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.