Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization

Peer production online communities are groups of people that collaboratively engage in the building of common resources such as wikis and open source projects. In such communities, participation is highly unequal: few people concentrate the majority of the workload, while the rest provide irregular...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Tenorio Fornés, Ámbar, Arroyo Gallardo, Javier, Hassan Collado, Samer
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
Repositorio:Docta Complutense
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/72434
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/72434
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Commons-based peer production
Open collaboration
Participation inequality
Power-law
Truncated power-law
Online communities
Wiki communities
Informática (Informática)
Redes
1203.17 Informática
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spelling Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterizationTenorio Fornés, ÁmbarArroyo Gallardo, JavierHassan Collado, SamerCommons-based peer productionOpen collaborationParticipation inequalityPower-lawTruncated power-lawOnline communitiesWiki communitiesInformática (Informática)Redes1203.17 InformáticaPeer production online communities are groups of people that collaboratively engage in the building of common resources such as wikis and open source projects. In such communities, participation is highly unequal: few people concentrate the majority of the workload, while the rest provide irregular and sporadic contributions. The distribution of participation is typically characterized as a power law distribution. However, recent statistical studies on empirical data have challenged the power law dominance in other domains. This work critically examines the assumption that the distribution of participation in wikis follows such distribution. We use statistical tools to analyse over 6,000 wikis from Wikia/Fandom, the largest wiki repository. We study the empirical distribution of each wiki comparing it with different well-known skewed distributions. The results show that the power law performs poorly, surpassed by three others with a more moderated heavy-tail behavior. In particular, the truncated power law is superior to all competing distributions, or superior to some and as good as the rest, in 99.3% of the cases. These findings have implications that can inform a better modeling of participation in peer production, and help to produce more accurate predictions of the tail behavior, which represents the activity and frequency of the core contributors. Thus, we propose to consider the truncated power law as the distribution to characterize participation distribution in wiki communities. Furthermore, the truncated power law parameters provide a meaningful interpretation to characterize the community in terms of the frequency of participation of occasional contributors and how unequal are the group of core contributors. Finally, we found a relationship between the parameters and the productivity of the community and its size. These results open research venues for the characterization of communities in wikis and in online peer production.PeerJ Inc.Universidad Complutense de Madrid20222022-01-0320222022-01-03journal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501info:eu-repo/semantics/articleapplication/pdfhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/72434reponame:Docta Complutenseinstname:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)Inglésengopen accesshttp://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2Atribución 3.0 Españahttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccessoai:docta.ucm.es:20.500.14352/724342026-06-02T12:44:21Z
dc.title.none.fl_str_mv Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization
title Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization
spellingShingle Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization
Tenorio Fornés, Ámbar
Commons-based peer production
Open collaboration
Participation inequality
Power-law
Truncated power-law
Online communities
Wiki communities
Informática (Informática)
Redes
1203.17 Informática
title_short Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization
title_full Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization
title_fullStr Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization
title_full_unstemmed Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization
title_sort Participation in wiki communities: reconsidering their statistical characterization
dc.creator.none.fl_str_mv Tenorio Fornés, Ámbar
Arroyo Gallardo, Javier
Hassan Collado, Samer
author Tenorio Fornés, Ámbar
author_facet Tenorio Fornés, Ámbar
Arroyo Gallardo, Javier
Hassan Collado, Samer
author_role author
author2 Arroyo Gallardo, Javier
Hassan Collado, Samer
author2_role author
author
dc.contributor.none.fl_str_mv Universidad Complutense de Madrid
dc.subject.none.fl_str_mv Commons-based peer production
Open collaboration
Participation inequality
Power-law
Truncated power-law
Online communities
Wiki communities
Informática (Informática)
Redes
1203.17 Informática
topic Commons-based peer production
Open collaboration
Participation inequality
Power-law
Truncated power-law
Online communities
Wiki communities
Informática (Informática)
Redes
1203.17 Informática
description Peer production online communities are groups of people that collaboratively engage in the building of common resources such as wikis and open source projects. In such communities, participation is highly unequal: few people concentrate the majority of the workload, while the rest provide irregular and sporadic contributions. The distribution of participation is typically characterized as a power law distribution. However, recent statistical studies on empirical data have challenged the power law dominance in other domains. This work critically examines the assumption that the distribution of participation in wikis follows such distribution. We use statistical tools to analyse over 6,000 wikis from Wikia/Fandom, the largest wiki repository. We study the empirical distribution of each wiki comparing it with different well-known skewed distributions. The results show that the power law performs poorly, surpassed by three others with a more moderated heavy-tail behavior. In particular, the truncated power law is superior to all competing distributions, or superior to some and as good as the rest, in 99.3% of the cases. These findings have implications that can inform a better modeling of participation in peer production, and help to produce more accurate predictions of the tail behavior, which represents the activity and frequency of the core contributors. Thus, we propose to consider the truncated power law as the distribution to characterize participation distribution in wiki communities. Furthermore, the truncated power law parameters provide a meaningful interpretation to characterize the community in terms of the frequency of participation of occasional contributors and how unequal are the group of core contributors. Finally, we found a relationship between the parameters and the productivity of the community and its size. These results open research venues for the characterization of communities in wikis and in online peer production.
publishDate 2022
dc.date.none.fl_str_mv 2022
2022-01-03
2022
2022-01-03
dc.type.none.fl_str_mv journal article
http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501
dc.type.openaire.fl_str_mv info:eu-repo/semantics/article
format article
dc.identifier.none.fl_str_mv https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/72434
url https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/72434
dc.language.none.fl_str_mv Inglés
eng
language_invalid_str_mv Inglés
language eng
dc.rights.none.fl_str_mv open access
http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
Atribución 3.0 España
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/
dc.rights.openaire.fl_str_mv info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights_invalid_str_mv open access
http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
Atribución 3.0 España
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/
eu_rights_str_mv openAccess
dc.format.none.fl_str_mv application/pdf
dc.publisher.none.fl_str_mv PeerJ Inc.
publisher.none.fl_str_mv PeerJ Inc.
dc.source.none.fl_str_mv reponame:Docta Complutense
instname:Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
instname_str Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM)
reponame_str Docta Complutense
collection Docta Complutense
repository.name.fl_str_mv
repository.mail.fl_str_mv
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score 15.301629

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