Morten Warncke-Wang
Skip Abstract Section
Abstract
For peer production communities to be sustainable, they must attract and retain new contributors. Studies have identified social and technical barriers to entry and discovered some potential solutions, but these solutions have typically focused on a single highly successful community, the English Wikipedia, been tested in isolation, and rarely evaluated through controlled experiments. We propose the Newcomer Homepage, a central place where newcomers can learn how peer production works and find opportunities to contribute, as a solution for attracting and retaining newcomers. The homepage was built upon existing research and designed in collaboration with partner communities. Through a large-scale controlled experiment spanning 27 non-English Wikipedia wikis, we evaluate the homepage and find modest gains, and that having a positive effect on the newcomer experience depends on the newcomer's context. We discuss how this impacts interventions that aim to improve the newcomer experience in peer production communities.
- Joshua D Angrist and Jörn-Steffen Pischke. 2009. Mostly Harmless Econometrics: An Empiricist's Companion. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
- Denise Anthony, Sean W Smith, and Timothy Williamson. 2009. Reputation and Reliability in Collective Goods: The Case of the Online Encyclopedia Wikipedia. Rationality and Society 21, 3 (2009), 283--306.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Douglas Bates, Martin Mächler, Ben Bolker, and Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting Linear Mixed-Effects Models Using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67, 1 (2015), 1--48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01Google ScholarCross Ref
- Yochai Benkler. 2002. Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and "the Nature of the Firm". Yale Law Journal (2002), 369--446.Google Scholar
- Yochai Benkler, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2015. Peer Production: A Form of Collective Intelligence. Handbook of Collective Intelligence 175 (2015).Google Scholar
- Andrew Brown. 2015. Wikipedia editors are a dying breed. The reason? Mobile. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/25/wikipedia-editors-dying-breed-mobile-smartphone-technology-online-encyclopedia. Retrieved July 6, 2022.Google Scholar
- Susan L Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman. 2005. Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia. In Proceedings of GROUP. 1--10.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Moira Burke and Robert Kraut. 2008. Mopping Up: Modeling Wikipedia Promotion Decisions. In Proc. of CSCW (San Diego, CA, USA). 27--36. https://doi.org/10.1145/1460563.1460571Google ScholarDigital Library
- Paul-Christian Bürkner. 2017. brms: An R Package for Bayesian Multilevel Models Using Stan. Journal of Statistical Software 80, 1 (2017), 1--28. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v080.i01Google ScholarCross Ref
- Paul-Christian Bürkner. 2018. Advanced Bayesian Multilevel Modeling with the R Package brms. The R Journal 10, 1 (2018), 395--411. https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2018-017Google ScholarCross Ref
- Chunyang Chen, Zhenchang Xing, and Yang Liu. 2017. By the Community & For the Community: A Deep Learning Approach to Assist Collaborative Editing in Q&A Sites. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 1, CSCW (2017), 1--21.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Noam Cohen. 2011. Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia's Contributor List. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html. Retrieved July 13, 2022.Google Scholar
- Dan Cosley, Dan Frankowski, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl. 2007. SuggestBot: Using Intelligent Task Routing to Help People Find Work in Wikipedia. In Proc. IUI (Honolulu, Hawaii, USA). 32--41. https://doi.org/10.1145/1216295.1216309Google ScholarDigital Library
- Martin Dittus and Licia Capra. 2017. Private Peer Feedback as Engagement Driver in Humanitarian Mapping. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 1, CSCW, Article 40 (dec 2017), 18 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134675Google ScholarDigital Library
- Martin Dittus, Giovanni Quattrone, and Licia Capra. 2016. Analysing volunteer engagement in humanitarian mapping: building contributor communities at large scale. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. 108--118.Google ScholarDigital Library
- The Economist. 2021. Wikipedia is 20, and its reputation has never been higher. https://www.economist.com/international/2021/01/09/wikipedia-is-20-and-its-reputation-has-never-been-higher. Retrieved July 6, 2022.Google Scholar
- Denae Ford, Justin Smith, Philip J. Guo, and Chris Parnin. 2016. Paradise Unplugged: Identifying Barriers for Female Participation on Stack Overflow. In Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering. New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/2950290.2950331Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andrea Forte, Nazanin Andalibi, and Rachel Greenstadt. 2017. Privacy, anonymity, and perceived risk in open collaboration: A study of Tor users and Wikipedians. In Proceedings of CSCW. 1800--1811.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wikimedia Foundation. 2014. Research:Asking anonymous editors to register. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Research:Asking_anonymous_editors_to_register&oldid=18839498. Retrieved July 11, 2022.Google Scholar
- Wikimedia Foundation. 2021. Data Retention Guidelines. https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Data_retention_guidelines&oldid=21009378. Retrieved July 6, 2022.Google Scholar
- John Fox, Christian Kleiber, Achim Zeileis, and Nikolas Kuschnig. 2021. ivreg: Instrumental-Variables Regression. https://cran.r-project.org/package=ivreg. Retrieved January 14, 2023.Google Scholar
- Jana Gallus. 2017. Fostering Public Good Contributions with Symbolic Awards: A Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment at Wikipedia. Management Science 63, 12 (2017), 3999--4015.Google ScholarDigital Library
- R Stuart Geiger and Aaron Halfaker. 2013. When the Levee Breaks: Without Bots, What Happens to Wikipedia's Quality Control Processes?. In Proceedings of OpenSym.Google Scholar
- R. Stuart Geiger and David Ribes. 2010. The work of sustaining order in Wikipedia: the banning of a vandal. In Proc. CSCW. 117--126. https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718941Google ScholarDigital Library
- Andrew Gelman and Jennifer Hill. 2006. Data Analysis Using Regression and Multilevel/Hierarchical Models. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- Mark Graham, Bernie Hogan, Ralph K Straumann, and Ahmed Medhat. 2014. Uneven geographies of user-generated information: Patterns of increasing informational poverty. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, 4 (2014), 746--764.Google ScholarCross Ref
- M. Haklay and P. Weber. 2008. OpenStreetMap: User-Generated Street Maps. IEEE Pervasive Computing 7, 4 (Oct 2008), 12--18. https://doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2008.80Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aaron Halfaker. 2017. Interpolating quality dynamics in Wikipedia and demonstrating the Keilana effect. In Proceedings of OpenSym.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aaron Halfaker and R Stuart Geiger. 2020. ORES: Lowering Barriers with Participatory Machine Learning in Wikipedia. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 4, CSCW2 (2020), 1--37.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aaron Halfaker, R. Stuart Geiger, Jonathan T. Morgan, and John Riedl. 2013. The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System: How Wikipedia's Reaction to Popularity Is Causing Its Decline. American Behavioral Scientist 57, 5 (2013), 664--688. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764212469365 arXiv:http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/5/664.full.pdfhtmlGoogle ScholarCross Ref
- Aaron Halfaker, Aniket Kittur, Robert Kraut, and John Riedl. 2009. A jury of your peers: quality, experience and ownership in Wikipedia. In Proc. WikiSym. https://doi.org/10.1145/1641309.1641332Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eszter Hargittai and Aaron Shaw. 2015. Mind the skills gap: the role of Internet know-how and gender in differentiated contributions to Wikipedia. Information, Communication & Society 18, 4 (2015), 424--442.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Brent Hecht and Darren Gergle. 2009. Measuring self-focus bias in community-maintained knowledge repositories. In Proc. C&T. 11--20.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw. 2013. The Wikipedia Gender Gap Revisited: Characterizing Survey Response Bias with Propensity Score Estimation. PLoS ONE 8, 6 (06 2013), 1--5. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0065782Google ScholarCross Ref
- Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Shaw. 2021. The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From Peer Production. Communication Research 48, 6 (2021), 771--795.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Desislava Hristova, Giovanni Quattrone, Afra J Mashhadi, and Licia Capra. 2013. The Life of the Party: Impact of Social Mapping in OpenStreetMap. In Proc. of ICWSM.Google Scholar
- Shih-Wen Huang, Minhyang Suh, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Gary Hsieh. 2015. How Activists Are Both Born and Made: An Analysis of Users on Change.org. In Proceedings of CHI. 211--220.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Corey Brian Jackson, Kevin Crowston, and Carsten Østerlund. 2018. Did they login? Patterns of Anonymous Contributions in Online Communities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 2, CSCW (2018), 1--16.Google Scholar
- Isaac L. Johnson, Yilun Lin, Toby Jia-Jun Li, Andrew Hall, Aaron Halfaker, Johannes Schöning, and Brent Hecht. 2016. Not at Home on the Range: Peer Production and the Urban/Rural Divide. In Proc. of CHI. 13--25. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858123Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sejal Khatri, Aaron Shaw, Sayamindu Dasgupta, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. The Social Embeddedness of Peer Production: A Comparative Qualitative Analysis of Three Indian Language Wikipedia Editions. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501832Google ScholarDigital Library
- Maximilian Klein, Harsh Gupta, Vivek Rai, Piotr Konieczny, and Haiyi Zhu. 2016. Monitoring the Gender Gap with Wikidata Human Gender Indicators. In Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium on Open Collaboration. https://doi.org/10.1145/2957792.2957798Google ScholarDigital Library
- Piotr Konieczny and Maximilian Klein. 2018. Gender gap through time and space: A journey through Wikipedia biographies via the Wikidata Human Gender Indicator. New Media & Society 20, 12 (2018), 4608--4633.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Shyong (Tony) K. Lam, Anuradha Uduwage, Zhenhua Dong, Shilad Sen, David R. Musicant, Loren Terveen, and John Riedl. 2011. WP:Clubhouse?: An Exploration of Wikipedia's Gender Imbalance. In Proc. of WikiSym. 1--10.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- Amanda Lee, Jeffrey C. Carver, and Amiangshu Bosu. 2017. Understanding the Impressions, Motivations, and Barriers of One Time Code Contributors to FLOSS Projects: A Survey. In 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). 187--197. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE.2017.25Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ang Li, Zheng Yao, Diyi Yang, Chinmay Kulkarni, Rosta Farzan, and Robert E. Kraut. 2020. Successful Online Socialization: Lessons from the Wikipedia Education Program. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW1, Article 50 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1145/3392857Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zarif Mahmud, Aarjav Chauhan, Dipto Sarkar, and Robert Soden. 2022. Revisiting Engagement in Humanitarian Mapping: An Updated Analysis of Contributor Retention in OpenStreetMap. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts. 1--6.Google Scholar
- Christopher Mendez, Hema Susmita Padala, Zoe Steine-Hanson, Claudia Hilderbrand, Amber Horvath, Charles Hill, Logan Simpson, Nupoor Patil, Anita Sarma, and Margaret Burnett. 2018. Open Source Barriers to Entry, Revisited: A Sociotechnical Perspective. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '18). https://doi.org/10.1145/3180155.3180241Google ScholarDigital Library
- Amanda Menking, Ingrid Erickson, and Wanda Pratt. 2019. People Who Can Take It: How Women Wikipedians Negotiate and Navigate Safety. In Proceedings of CHI. 1--14.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jonathan T. Morgan, Siko Bouterse, Heather Walls, and Sarah Stierch. 2013. Tea and Sympathy: Crafting Positive New User Experiences on Wikipedia. In Proc. of CSCW. 839--848.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jonathan T. Morgan and Anna Filippova. 2018. 'Welcome' Changes? Descriptive and Injunctive Norms in a Wikipedia Sub-Community. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, CSCW, Article 52 (nov 2018), 26 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274321Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jonathan T. Morgan and Aaron Halfaker. 2018. Evaluating the impact of the Wikipedia Teahouse on newcomer socialization and retention. In Proceedings of OpenSym. 1--7.Google Scholar
- David R Musicant, Yuqing Ren, James A Johnson, and John Riedl. 2011. Mentoring in Wikipedia: a Clash of Cultures. In Proceedings of WikiSym. 173--182.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sneha Narayan, Jake Orlowitz, Jonathan Morgan, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Aaron Shaw. 2017. The Wikipedia Adventure: Field Evaluation of an Interactive Tutorial for New Users. In Proceedings of CSCW. 1785--1799.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chitu Okoli, Mohamad Mehdi, Mostafa Mesgari, Finn Årup Nielsen, and Arto Lanamäki. 2012. The people's encyclopedia under the gaze of the sages: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia. Available at SSRN 2021326 (2012).Google Scholar
- Chitu Okoli, Mohamad Mehdi, Mostafa Mesgari, Finn Årup Nielsen, and Arto Lanamäki. 2014. Wikipedia in the eyes of its beholders: A systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia readers and readership. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 65, 12 (2014), 2381--2403.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Katherine Panciera, Aaron Halfaker, and Loren Terveen. 2009. Wikipedians Are Born, Not Made: A Study of Power Editors on Wikipedia. In Proc. GROUP. 51--60.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Joseph Reagle and Lauren Rhue. 2011. Gender Bias in Wikipedia and Britannica. International Journal of Communication 5, 0 (2011).Google Scholar
- Reboot and the Wikimedia Foundation. 2017. New Editor Experiences. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: New_Editor_Experiences_summary_of_findings,_August_2017.pdf. Retrieved July 5, 2022.Google Scholar
- Igor Steinmacher, Christoph Treude, and Marco Aurelio Gerosa. 2018. Let me in: Guidelines for the Successful Onboarding of Newcomers to Open Source Projects. IEEE Software 36, 4 (2018), 41--49.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Monica Stephens. 2013. Gender and the GeoWeb: divisions in the production of user-generated cartographic information. GeoJournal (2013), 1--16. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-013--9492-z 00001.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Besiki Stvilia, Abdullah Al-Faraj, and Yong Jeong Yi. 2009. Issues of cross-contextual information quality evaluation-- The case of Arabic, English, and Korean Wikipedias. Library & Information Science Research 31, 4 (2009), 232--239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lisr.2009.07.005Google ScholarCross Ref
- Nathan TeBlunthuis, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2018. Revisiting ?The Rise and Decline" in a Population of Peer Production Projects. In Proceedings of CHI. 1--7.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Claudia Wagner, David Garcia, Mohsen Jadidi, and Markus Strohmaier. 2021. It's a Man's Wikipedia? Assessing Gender Inequality in an Online Encyclopedia. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 9, 1 (Aug. 2021), 454--463. https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/14628Google ScholarCross Ref
- Morten Warncke-Wang, Anuradha Uduwage, Zhenhua Dong, and John Riedl. 2012. In Search of the Ur-Wikipedia: Universality, Similarity, and Translation in the Wikipedia Inter-language Link Network. In Proceedings of WikiSym.Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Increasing Participation in Peer Production Communities with the Newcomer Homepage
Recommendations
Predicting Member Productivity and Withdrawal from Pre-Joining Attachments in Online Production Groups
CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social ComputingProductive and dedicated members are critical to the success of online production communities like Wikipedia. Many communities organize in subgroups where members voluntarily work on projects of shared interest. In this paper, we investigate how members'...
Evaluating the impact of the Wikipedia Teahouse on newcomer socialization and retention
OpenSym '18: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open CollaborationEffective socialization of new contributors is vital for the long-term sustainability of open collaboration projects. Previous research has identified many common barriers to participation. However, few interventions employed to increase newcomer ...
Out With The Old, In With The New?: Unpacking Member Turnover in Online Production Groups
Nearly any group is subject to turnover : some people leave, while others join. Turnover can be especially high in online groups, since participation typically is strictly voluntary. We investigated the effects of member turnover in online groups, ...
Comments