Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Keeping up on Current Events! A Case Study of Newcomers to Wikipedia

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Social Informatics (SocInfo 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11185))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

Online production communities such as Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap play an important role in connecting the public with major events in society. The popularity of a major event, together with the popularity of online communities brings the general public to collaborate on and co-create knowledge about the event. The high level of interest in capturing what draws the attention of society can particularly help online production communities meet one of the essential challenges they face: attracting and retaining newcomers. In this work, we explore how newcomers in such communities respond to knowledge production around major societal events. Analysis of the participation of 506 newcomers to Wikipedia articles related to three highly popular events shows that the popularity of the events attracts a new wave of users to the online community. These newcomers provide valuable contributions to the community, however, at a differing level depending on their initial motivation and experiences. Those participants who joined the online community solely to contribute to one topic or event are more likely to face challenges in contribution and leave Wikipedia after limited contribution. We discuss factors and patterns of newcomers’ early and longer-term participation in Wikipedia in relation to three popular events.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Main_page.

  2. 2.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events.

  3. 3.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Category.

  4. 4.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Black_Lives_Matter.

  5. 5.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2014_FIFA_World_Cup.

  6. 6.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:West_African_Ebola_virus_epidemic.

  7. 7.

    We excluded any editors who had been blocked from Wikipedia.

  8. 8.

    https://trends.google.com/trends/.

  9. 9.

    https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ORES.

  10. 10.

    https://ores.wikimedia.org/.

  11. 11.

    Due to computing limitation, we only collected the good-faith quality and reverts within four months after registration. As newcomers’ editing quality has already converged at a relatively stable level within even first couple weeks, the four months data is a reasonable time period to evaluate the contribution quality.

  12. 12.

    http://pythonhosted.org/mwreverts/.

  13. 13.

    http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/statements/2014/ebola-20140808/en/.

  14. 14.

    Represented graphs are included in Appendix Fig.  5. Figure 6 visualized the editors’ registration activities which are also corresponding to the major current events.

  15. 15.

    Hazard Ratio can be interpreted as: one degree increase in out-degree reduces the hazard by a factor of 0.0001, or 99.99%.

  16. 16.

    Another example can be found at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charlestonchurchshooting&type=revision&diff=667541754.

References

  1. Allen, N., Meyer, J.: The measurement and antecedents of affective, continuance and normative commitment to the organization. J. Occup. Psychol. 63(1), 1–18 (1990)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Arguello, J., et al.: Talk to me: foundations for successful individual-group interactions in online communities. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2006, pp. 959–968. ACM, New York (2006). https://doi.org/10.1145/1124772.1124916. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1124772.1124916

  3. Beauvois, J., et al.: Intrinsic motivation and self determination in human behavior (1985)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bryant, S.L., Forte, A., Bruckman, A.: Becoming wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In: Proceedings of the 2005 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, pp. 1–10. ACM (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Burke, M., Marlow, C., Lento, T.: Feed me: motivating newcomer contribution in social network sites. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2009, pp. 945–954. ACM, New York (2009). https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518847. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1518701.1518847

  6. Burke, M., Settles, B.: Plugged in to the community: social motivators in online goal-setting groups. In: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, C&T 2011, pp. 1–10. ACM, New York (2011). https://doi.org/10.1145/2103354.2103356. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2103354.2103356

  7. Cheng, J., Lo, C., Leskovec, J.: Predicting intent using activity logs: how goal specificity and temporal range affect user behavior. In: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion, International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, pp. 593–601 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Choi, B., Alexander, K., Kraut, R.E., Levine, J.M.: Socialization tactics in Wikipedia and their effects. In: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 2010, pp. 107–116. ACM, New York (2010). https://doi.org/10.1145/1718918.1718940. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1718918.1718940

  9. Dabbish, L., Farzan, R., Kraut, R., Postmes, T.: Fresh faces in the crowd: turnover, identity, and commitment in online groups. In: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, pp. 245–248. ACM (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Dittus, M., Quattrone, G., Capra, L.: Analysing volunteer engagement in humanitarian mapping: building contributor communities at large scale. In: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, pp. 108–118. ACM (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Dittus, M., Quattrone, G., Capra, L.: Social contribution settings and newcomer retention in humanitarian crowd mapping. In: Spiro, E., Ahn, Y.-Y. (eds.) SocInfo 2016. LNCS, vol. 10047, pp. 179–193. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47874-6_13

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Ducheneaut, N.: Socialization in an open source software community: a socio-technical analysis. Comput. Support. Coop. Work 14(4), 323–368 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-005-9000-1

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Farzan, R., Kraut, R.E.: Wikipedia classroom experiment: bidirectional benefits of students’ engagement in online production communities. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 783–792. ACM (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Ferron, M., Massa, P.: Collective memory building in Wikipedia: the case of north African uprisings. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, pp. 114–123. ACM (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Foundation, W.: Wikimedia strategic plan: a collaborative vision for the movement through 2015. Technical report, Wikimedia Foundation (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Foundation, W.: Wikipedia, Teahouse (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Haklay, M., Weber, P.: Openstreetmap: user-generated street maps. IEEE Pervasive Comput. 7(4), 12–18 (2008)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Halfaker, A., Geiger, R.S., Morgan, J.T., Riedl, J.: The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: how wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline. Am. Behav. Sci. 57(5), 664–688 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Halfaker, A., Kittur, A., Riedl, J.: Don’t bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, WikiSym 2011, pp. 163–172. ACM, New York (2011). https://doi.org/10.1145/2038558.2038585

  20. Halfaker, A., Kittur, A., Riedl, J.: Don’t bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, pp. 163–172. ACM (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Java, A., Song, X., Finin, T., Tseng, B.: Why we Twitter: understanding microblogging usage and communities. In: Proceedings of the 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 Workshop on Web Mining and Social Network Analysis, pp. 56–65. ACM (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Keegan, B., Gergle, D., Contractor, N.: Hot off the wiki: dynamics, practices, and structures in Wikipedia’s coverage of the tōhoku catastrophes. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, pp. 105–113. ACM (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Keegan, B., Gergle, D., Contractor, N.: Staying in the loop: structure and dynamics of Wikipedia’s breaking news collaborations. In: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, WikiSym 2012, pp. 1:1–1:10. ACM, New York (2012). https://doi.org/10.1145/2462932.2462934. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2462932.2462934

  24. Keegan, B., Gergle, D., Contractor, N.: Hot off the wiki: structures and dynamics of Wikipedia’s coverage of breaking news events. Am. Behav. Sci. 57(5), 595–622 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Keegan, B.C.: A history of newswork on Wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, WikiSym 2013, pp. 7:1–7:10. ACM, New York (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2491055.2491062. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2491055.2491062

  26. Keegan, B.C.: A history of newswork on Wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, p. 7. ACM (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Keegan, B.C.: Emergent social roles in wikipedia’s breaking news collaborations. In: Bertino, E., Matei, S.A. (eds.) Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets. CSS, pp. 57–79. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05467-4_4

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  28. Klein, J.P., Moeschberger, M.L.: Survival Analysis: Techniques for Censored and Truncated Data. Springer, New York (2005)

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  29. Kloumann, I., Adamic, L., Kleinberg, J., Wu, S.: The lifecycles of apps in a social ecosystem. In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web, International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee, pp. 581–591 (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Kraut, R., Wang, X., Butler, B., Joyce, E., Burke, M.: Beyond information: developing the relationship between the individual and the group in online communities. Inf. Syst. Res. 10 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Kraut, R.E., et al.: Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. MIT Press (2012)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Lampe, C., Johnston, E.: Follow the (slash) dot: effects of feedback on new members in an online community. In: Proceedings of the 2005 International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, GROUP 2005, pp. 11–20. ACM, New York (2005). https://doi.org/10.1145/1099203.1099206. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1099203.1099206

  33. Luyt, B.: Wikipedia, collective memory, and the vietnam war. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 67(8), 1956–1961 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  34. Nov, O.: What motivates Wikipedians? Commun. ACM 50(11), 60–64 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  35. Palen, L., Soden, R., Anderson, T.J., Barrenechea, M.: Success and scale in a data-producing organization: the socio-technical evolution of openstreetmap in response to humanitarian events. In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 4113–4122. ACM (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Panciera, K., Halfaker, A., Terveen, L.: Wikipedians are born, not made: a study of power editors on Wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the ACM 2009 International Conference on Supporting Group Work, pp. 51–60. ACM (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Panciera, K., Priedhorsky, R., Erickson, T., Terveen, L.: Lurking? cyclopaths?: a quantitative lifecycle analysis of user behavior in a geowiki. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 1917–1926. ACM (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Pentzold, C.: Fixing the floating gap: the online encyclopaedia wikipedia as a global memory place. Mem. Stud. 2(2), 255–272 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Roberts, J.A., Hann, I.H., Slaughter, S.A.: Understanding the motivations, participation, and performance of open source software developers: a longitudinal study of the apache projects. Manag. Sci. 52(7), 984–999 (2006)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Ryan, R.M., Deci, E.L.: Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations: classic definitions and new directions. Contemp. Educ. Psychol. 25(1), 54–67 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Soden, R., Palen, L.: From crowdsourced mapping to community mapping: the post-earthquake work of openStreetMap Haiti. In: Rossitto, C., Ciolfi, L., Martin, D., Conein, B. (eds.) COOP 2014 - Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems, 27-30 May 2014, Nice (France), pp. 311–326. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06498-7_19

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  42. Steinmacher, I., Silva, M.A.G., Gerosa, M.A., Redmiles, D.F.: A systematic literature review on the barriers faced by newcomers to open source software projects. Inf. Softw. Technol. 59, 67–85 (2015)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Tausczik, Y., Farzan, R., Levine, J.M., Kraut, R.: Consequences of socializing newcomers collectively in online communities. INGroup: Interdisciplinary Network for Group Research (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  44. Thebault-Spieker, J., Hecht, B., Terveen, L.: Geographic biases are ‘born, not made’: exploring contributors’ spatiotemporal behavior in openstreetmap. In: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM Conference on Supporting Groupwork, GROUP 2018, pp. 71–82. ACM, New York (2018). https://doi.org/10.1145/3148330.3148350. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3148330.3148350

  45. Twyman, M., Keegan, B.C., Shaw, A.: Black lives matter in Wikipedia: collective memory and collaboration around online social movements. In: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017, pp. 1400–1412. ACM, New York (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998232. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2998181.2998232

  46. Zeitlyn, D.: Gift economies in the development of open source software: anthropological reflections. Res. Policy 32(7), 1287–1291 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  47. Zhu, H., Zhang, A., He, J., Kraut, R.E., Kittur, A.: Effects of peer feedback on contribution: a field experiment in Wikipedia. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2013, pp. 2253–2262. ACM, New York (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2481311

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 15213, USA

    Ang Li & Rosta Farzan

Authors
  1. Ang Li
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Rosta Farzan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rosta Farzan .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Koblenz, Koblenz, Germany

    Steffen Staab

  2. National Research University Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg, Russia

    Olessia Koltsova

  3. National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Dmitry I. Ignatov

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 5.
figure 5

Newcomer editing activity timeline correspond closely with the Google trend as well as the offline current event timeline

Full size image
Fig. 6.
figure 6

Newcomer registration timeline correspond closely with the Google trend as well as the offline current event timeline: This figure visualizes the monthly registration activity of the event-driven newcomers. As presented in the graph, we observed that peaks in the event-driven newcomers’ registration activity closely corresponds to the offline events for all three cases.

Full size image

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Li, A., Farzan, R. (2018). Keeping up on Current Events! A Case Study of Newcomers to Wikipedia. In: Staab, S., Koltsova, O., Ignatov, D. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11185. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_22

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01129-1_22

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-01128-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01129-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation