Wikimedia Research/Showcase/Archive/2021/01
January 2021
[edit]- Theme
- Macro-level organizational analysis of peer production communities
January 20, 2021 Video: YouTube
- The importance of thinking big. Convergence, divergence, and interdependence among wikis and peer production communities
- By Aaron Shaw (Northwestern University)
- Designing and governing collaborative, peer production communities can benefit from large-scale, macro-level thinking that focuses on communities as the units of analysis. For example, understanding how and why seemingly comparable communities may follow convergent, divergent, and/or interdependent patterns of behavior can inform more parsimonious theoretical and empirical insights as well as more effective strategic action. This talk gives a sneak peak at research-in-progress by members of the Community Data Science Collective to illustrate these points. In particular, I focus on studies of (1) convergent trends of formalization in several large Wikipedias; (2) divergent editor engagement among three small Wikipedias; and (3) commensal patterns of ecological interdependence across communities. Together, the studies underscore the value and challenges of macro-level organizational analysis of peer production and social computing systems.
- By Aaron Shaw (Northwestern University)