Revisiting The Rise and Decline in a Population of Peer Production Projects
Authors | Nathan TeBlunthuis Aaron D. Shaw Benjamin Mako Hill |
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Publication date | 2018 |
ISBN | 978-145035620-6;978-145035621-3 |
DOI | 10.1145/3173574.3173929 |
Links | Original Preprint |
Revisiting The Rise and Decline in a Population of Peer Production Projects - scientific work about Wikipedia quality published in 2018, written by Nathan TeBlunthuis, Aaron D. Shaw and Benjamin Mako Hill.
Overview
Do patterns of growth and stabilization found in large peer production systems such as Wikipedia occur in other communities? This study assesses the generalizability of Halfaker et al.'s influential 2013 paper on "The Rise and Decline of an Open Collaboration System." Authors replicate its tests of several theories related to newcomer retention and norm entrenchment using a dataset of hundreds of active peer production wikis from Wikia. Authors reproduce the subset of the findings from Halfaker and colleagues that authors are able to test, comparing both the estimated signs and magnitudes of our models. Our results support the external validity of Halfaker et al.'s claims that quality control systems may limit the growth of peer production communities by deterring new contributors and that norms tend to become entrenched over time.