As the world\u2019s largest online encyclopedia, countless users retrieve\ninformation its articles. Its success demonstrates one of the many conveniences\nbrought. Its effectiveness can be measured or illustrated by the quality of its\narticles. When an article is inevitably contributed by many contributors and\neditors, a common expectation or danger is the decreased effectiveness or\nquality due to increased coordination requirement. In reality however, the\nsuccess of Wikipedia contradicts such fact observed in other places. The\nresearchers employ longitudinal data to examine different coordination\nconditions that can influence the quality of coordinated articles. The authors\nfound that the effectiveness of adding contributors is critically dependent on\nthe degree and type of coordination those contributors use, as well as the life\ncycle of the article and the interdependence of the tasks involved in editing\nit. Coordination is categorized into two classes – explicit and implicit. Life cycle\nrefers to the difference in interdependence among tasks. The results suggest\nthat appropriate coordination among editors leads to better article quality even\nwith increased number of editors. While the authors were not clear on why concentration\nof work predicts better article quality, they suspected it was due to\nbetter-distributed collaborative tasks among different contributors. The study is\napplicable to other free, open environment such as Linux OSS. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This type of study is completely new to me and I was quite\nhappy reading it. From a pure computer science point of view, the method used\nin the study should be valid. It has been a while since I read something without\nuser-oriented evaluation or proof-of-concept. I think the authors make a strong\nargument that coordination being a key component in the success of Wikipedia.\nAs the authors noted themselves, some of their assumptions used in the longitudinal\nanalysis are challengeable to some extent. This example of using Wikipedia\nreminds me of another article I read earlier this semester about a scholar of\nhistory found it hard to correct a commonly accepted wrong fact. The scholar gathered\nenough evidence to make a reasonable claim but Wikipedia\u2019s editor refused to\ntake it and criticizing on the lack of peer-reviewed result. The scholar waited\nfor one and a half year or so till his new book came out so that he can cite\nsome \u201cpeer-reviewed\u201d literature to support his claim. To his surprise, his modification\nwas reverted anyway. Another editor further questioned his book\u2019s credibility\nand refused his modification request, despite the fact that more and more scholars\nin the field begun to accept the new history fact. This is just an example that\ncan challenge the author\u2019s assumptions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A trend in reviewing conference paper is reproductivity. I\u2019m\ntotally new to this type of publication, but I think the authors need to make a\nstronger argument in the difficulty of the research, analysis or data\ngathering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
what\u2019s the cost for the authors to assemble the data? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summary: As the world\u2019s largest online encyclopedia, countless users retrieve information its articles. Its success demonstrates one of the many conveniences brought. Its effectiveness can be measured or illustrated by the quality of its articles. When an article is inevitably contributed by many contributors and editors, a common expectation or danger is the decreased effectiveness…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":261,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/ccc2019s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/ccc2019s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/ccc2019s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/ccc2019s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/261"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/ccc2019s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/ccc2019s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":198,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/ccc2019s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/198"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/ccc2019s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/ccc2019s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.cs.vt.edu\/ccc2019s\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}