Latent Groups in Online Communities: a Longitudinal Study in Wikipedia

Latent Groups in Online Communities: a Longitudinal Study in Wikipedia - scientific work related to Wikipedia quality published in 2018, written by Arto Lanamäki and Juho Lindman.

Overview

Research on online communities has shown that content production involves manifest groups and latent users. This paper conceptualizes a related but distinct phenomenon of latent groups. Authors ground this contribution in a longitudinal study on the Finnish Wikipedia (2007---2014). In the case of experts working on content within their area of expertise, individuals can constitute a group that maintains itself over time. In such a setting, it becomes viable to view the group as an acting unit instead of as individual nodes in a network. Such groups are able to sustain their activities even over periods of inactivity. Authors theoretical contribution is the conceptualization of latent groups, which includes two conditions: 1) a group is capable of reforming after inactivity (i.e., dormant), and 2) a group is difficult to observe to an outsider (i.e., non-manifest).