Étiquette : online collaboration

Understanding collaboration in Wikipedia Wikipedia stands as…

Understanding collaboration in Wikipedia :

“Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online participation and collaboration. However, previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on simple metrics like rigor (i.e., the number of revisions in an article’s revision history) and diversity (i.e., the number of authors that have contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a few select articles. By looking more closely at metrics associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro–structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.”

URL : http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3613/3117

Persuading Collaboration: Analysing Part…

Persuading Collaboration: Analysing Participation in Online Collaboration Projects :

“The growth of worldwide internet usage has given rise to the phenomenon of ‘open movements’. These are communities that evolve based around the collaborative production of common resources, to which free access is typically provided to all who choose to use it. Such communities and the resources they create have developed rapidly over the past 10-20 years and are the cause for major scholarly interest. This study takes the step of applying the lens of Persuasive Design to the study of open movements in order to show how site design can play a role in increasing participant activity and longevity. For this purpose it looks at two ‘open movement’ resources, the collaboratively edited map OpenStreetMap and The Pirate Bay, a tracker for torrents uploaded by the le-sharing community. The analysis is two-fold: first, it uses quantitative data of user participation in the systems, derived from downloads of system-generated user-histories to generate an overall picture of user-participation in each of the systems. Second, it applies a set of heuristics to evaluate the persuasive design of the systems in question. It then connects the results of the quantitative analysis with the heuristic analysis in order to see how the persuasive design of the systems impact on user participation. This thesis will primarily be of value to researchers of online collaboration, although it may also be of interest to researchers in the field of Persuasive Design.”
URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/19155/