research-article

Making peripheral participation legitimate: reader engagement experiments in wikipedia

Authors:

Aaron Halfaker,

Dario TaraborelliAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work

Pages 849 - 860

https://doi.org/10.1145/2441776.2441872

Published: 23 February 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Open collaboration communities thrive when participation is plentiful. Recent research has shown that the English Wikipedia community has constructed a vast and accurate information resource primarily through the monumental effort of a relatively small number of active, volunteer editors. Beyond Wikipedia's active editor community is a substantially larger pool of potential participants: readers. In this paper we describe a set of field experiments using the Article Feedback Tool, a system designed to elicit lightweight contributions from Wikipedia's readers. Through the lens of social learning theory and comparisons to related work in open bug tracking software, we evaluate the costs and benefits of the expanded participation model and show both qualitatively and quantitatively that peripheral contributors add value to an open collaboration community as long as the cost of identifying low quality contributions remains low.

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Cited By

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Index Terms

Making peripheral participation legitimate: reader engagement experiments in wikipedia
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work

February 2013

1594 pages

ISBN:9781450313315

DOI:10.1145/2441776

General Chairs:
Amy Bruckman
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
,
Scott Counts
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Cliff Lampe
University of Michigan, USA
,
Loren Terveen
University of Minnesota, USA

Copyright © 2013 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 23 February 2013

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CSCW '13: Computer Supported Cooperative Work

February 23 - 27, 2013

Texas, San Antonio, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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Cited By

Peng ZChen QShen ZMa XOulasvirta A(2024)DesignQuizzer: A Community-Powered Conversational Agent for Learning Visual DesignProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373218:CSCW1(1-40)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637321
Prinster GSmith CTan CKeegan B(2024)Community Archetypes: An Empirical Framework for Guiding Research Methodologies to Reflect User Experiences of Sense of Virtual Community on RedditProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373108:CSCW1(1-33)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637310
Nyakundi HDe Souza C(2023)Fostering FOSS CommunitiesBusiness Models and Strategies for Open Source Projects10.4018/978-1-6684-4785-7.ch007(200-238)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-4785-7.ch007
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Cheng RHill B(2022)Many Destinations, Many Pathways: A Quantitative Analysis of Legitimate Peripheral Participation in ScratchProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35551066:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2022
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Khatri SShaw ADasgupta SHill B(2022)The social embeddedness of peer production: A comparative qualitative analysis of three Indian language Wikipedia editionsProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3501832(1-18)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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Trinkenreich BGuizani MWiese ISarma ASteinmacher I(2020)Hidden Figures: Roles and Pathways of Successful OSS ContributorsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34152514:CSCW2(1-22)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2020
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Introne JErickson ISemaan BGoggins S(2020)Designing sustainable online supportJournal of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/asi.2425071:4(379-394)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2020
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Holikatti MJhaver SKumar N(2019)Learning to Airbnb by Engaging in Online Communities of PracticeProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/33593303:CSCW(1-19)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2019
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