Coordination, Division of Labor, and Open Content Communities: Template Messages in Wiki-Based Collections

Loris Gaio, Alessandro Rossi (), Matthijs den Besten and Jean-Michel Dalle

No 903, DISA Working Papers from Department of Computer and Management Sciences, University of Trento, Italy

Abstract: In this paper we investigate how in commons based peer production a large community of contributors coordinates its efforts towards the production of high quality open content. We carry out our empirical analysis at the level of articles and focus on the dynamics surrounding their production. That is, we focus on the continuous process of revision and update due to the spontaneous and largely uncoordinated sequence of contributions by a multiplicity of individuals. We argue that this loosely regulated process, according to which any user can make changes to any entry, while allowing highly creative contributions, has to come into terms with potential issues with respect to the quality and consistency of the output. In this respect, we focus on emergent, bottom up organizational practice arising within the Wikipedia community, namely the use of template messages, which seems to act as an effective and parsimonious coordination device in emphasizing quality concerns (in terms of accuracy, consistency, completeness, fragmentation, and so on) or in highlighting the existence of other particular issues which are to be addressed. We focus on the template "NPOV" which signals breaches on the fundamental policy of neutrality of Wikipedia articles and we show how and to what extent imposing such template on a page affects the production process and changes the nature and division of labor among participants. We find that intensity of editing increases immediately after the "NPOV" template appears. Moreover, articles that are treated most successfully, in the sense that "NPOV" disappears again relatively soon, are those articles which receive the attention of a limited group of editors. In this dimension at least the distribution of tasks in Wikipedia looks quite similar to what is know about the distribution in the FLOSS development process.

Keywords: commons based peer production; wikipedia; wiki; survival analysis; quality; bug fixing; template messages; coordination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L86 M15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2009-07, Revised 2009-07-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ict
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.unitn.it/files/download/10530/03.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.unitn.it/files/download/10530/03.pdf [302 Found]--> https://www.unitn.it/files/download/10530/03.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:trt:disawp:0903

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
DISA Università degli Studi di Trento via Inama, 5 I-38122 Trento TN Italy
http://www.unitn.it/disa

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DISA Working Papers from Department of Computer and Management Sciences, University of Trento, Italy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roberto Gabriele ().