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How oversight improves member-maintained communities

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Online communities need regular maintenance activities such as moderation and data input, tasks that typically fall to community owners. Communities that allow all members to participate in maintenance tasks have the potential to be more robust and valuable. A key challenge in creating member-maintained communities is building interfaces, algorithms, and social structures that encourage people to provide high-quality contributions. We use Karau and Williams' collective effort model to predict how peer and expert editorial oversight affect members' contributions to a movie recommendation website and test these predictions in a field experiment with 87 contributors. Oversight increased both the quantity and quality of contributions while reducing antisocial behavior, and peers were as effective at oversight as experts. We draw design guidelines and suggest avenues for future work from our results.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    April 2005
    928 pages
    ISBN:1581139985
    DOI:10.1145/1054972
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 02 April 2005

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    Author Tags

    1. collective effort model
    2. contribution
    3. member-maintained
    4. online communities
    5. oversight
    6. participation
    7. quality

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    • (2022)Audience size, moderator activity, gender, and content diversity: Exploring user participation and financial commitment on Twitch.tvNew Media & Society10.1177/1461444821106999626:2(859-881)Online publication date: 16-Jan-2022
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