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CommunityData:Wikia rises and declines
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== Rationale == * Commons based peer production (CBPP) communities are admired for their ability to coordinate work on complex goods by workers with diverse motivations, without reliance on formal hierarchy or market transaction (Benkler 2002). Understanding how peer production projects this is an important question for designing more “efficient and equitable” systems for cooperative work on expanding categories of goods (Benkler, Shaw, and Hill 2015). * The number of active contributors to Wikipedia rose rapidly in 2005, but peaked in 2007 and began a gradual decline Halfaker et al. (2013). The decline is a source of concern for the long term success of peer production projects. * CBPP systems are able to perform decentralized governance work to resolve disputes and manage resources (Forte, Larco, and Bruckman 2009). * However, as communities grow, territorial and controlling senior members of the community can sometimes appropriate governance systems to centralize power (Shaw and Hill 2014). * Wikipedia’s decline has been explained by process in which influxes of newcomers correspond with increasing strict or impersonal governance quality control and that these hurt newcomer retention (Halfaker et al. 2013). Halfaker et al. (2013) show that quality control mechanisms including contribution rejection, formal and calcified rules, and algorithmic tool are associated with newcomer dropout on Wikipedia. * Kiene, Monroy-Hernández, and Hill (2016) similarly observe how an influx of newcomers lead an original horror fiction subreddit to develop stricter governance to preserve the community’s distinctive culture and collective identity. * Halfaker et al. (2013) also hypothesize that Wikipedia increased impersonal governance to deal with the massive influx of newcomers caused by Wikipedia’s popularity. * However, evidence for this as a theory about peer production systems in general rather than a phenomenon specific to Wikipedia requires observing many communities. It is unknown whether the mechanisms described by (Halfaker et al. 2013) generalize to other wikis. * This is important because this theory is informing design interventions on Wikipedia that aim to mitigate the decline by promoting newcomer socialization (Farzan et al. 2012; Morgan et al. 2013; Narayan et al. 2017; Halfaker, Geiger, and Terveen 2014). * Furthermore, it is informing the development of commons based peer production projects other than Wikipedia (Palen et al. 2015). * If influxes of newcomers promote strict governance, and strict governance conversely decreases newcomer activity, complex dynamics may arise. Growth patterns are often bursty (though not on Wikipedia). Crises other than newcomer influxes might also promote strict governance. In an extreme case a community may experience many crisis periods each of which accompany increases in governance. If governance does not decrease during periods of non-growth, it will accumulate and in the long run the community will die as newcomer attention approaches zero.
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