Reflection #5 – [03/05] – Viral Pasad

“Aniket Kittur, Robert E. Kraut. Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in Wikipedia: Quality through Co-ordination. CSCW ’08 Proceedings of the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work”

The authors discuss the process of how a Wikipedia article is edited multiple times to enhance/deteriorate the quality of the same. Since anyone can edit the contents of an article, this crowdsourcing allows a rapid back and forth editing, thus making the article prone to being on of a poor quality. The authors attempt to understand the dynamics involved in the collaboration of an article and how it relates to the quality of its contents.

With an appropriate level of coordination enhances the quality of an article with an increase in the number of collaborators/editors. The authors explain the two types of coordination, namely explicit and implicit. While the former happens through forums and discussions, the latter takes place via editor concentration. A structure can be well defined if a collaborator performs the majority of the initial heavy-lifting or groundwork which sets the bar for future collaborators to work on. However, it was observed that in the case of explicit coordination, the quality of the article decreases with the number of collaborators as the number of collaborators increases, as opposed to the case of implicit coordination.

This relates very well to my initial project idea of taking notes, which involved multiple collaborators, contributing to a shared resource. The paper was a very simple paper, which explained basic concepts of collaboration which one may have overlooked. It would be interesting to see such an analysis of collaboration done on collaboration of not just text but other formats of media.