Crowd Diversity and Performance in Wikipedia: The Mediating Effects of Task Conflict and Communication

ABSTRACT

Crowd diversity is a key attribute that impacts crowd performance in online collaboration systems. As a structural composition of a crowd, diversity is likely to influence crowd performance through communication processes during collaboration. This study examined how diversity influenced crowd performance under different conditions of task conflict and communication in Wikipedia article production. With a sample of 5,899 articles, we found that contribution diversity positively predicted crowd performance, whereas experience diversity was negatively related to performance. In addition, task communication and conflict partially mediated the relationship between crowd diversity and performance. Task communication positively predicted performance for both forms of diversity. Task conflict, on the other hand, was positively predicted by expertise diversity, but had negative associations with contribution diversity and performance. The findings help unpack the reasons for differential effects of diversity on crowd performance, and demonstrate the importance of including communication variables when studying online crowd collaboration.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing

    • Collaborative and social computing systems and tools

    • Collaborative and social computing theory, concepts and paradigms

• Information systems

  • World Wide Web

• Social and professional topics

  • Professional topics

    • Computing and business