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Coordinating tasks on the commons: designing for personal goals, expertise and serendipity

Published:04 April 2009Publication History

ABSTRACT

How is work created, assigned, and completed on large-scale, crowd-powered systems like Wikipedia? And what design principles might enable these federated online systems to be more effective? This paper reports on a qualitative study of work and task practices on Wikipedia. Despite the availability of tag-based community-wide task assignment mechanisms, informants reported that self-directed goals, within-topic expertise, and fortuitous discovery are more frequently used than community-tagged tasks. We examine how Wikipedia editors organize their actions and the actions of other participants, and what implications this has for understanding, and building tools for, crowd-powered systems, or any web site where the main

force of production comes from a crowd of online participants. From these observations and insights, we developed WikiTasks, a tool that integrates with Wikipedia and supports both grassroots creation of site-wide tasks and self-selection of personal tasks, accepted from this larger pool of community tasks.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2009
      2426 pages
      ISBN:9781605582467
      DOI:10.1145/1518701

      Copyright © 2009 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 4 April 2009

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      CHI '09 Paper Acceptance Rate277of1,130submissions,25%Overall Acceptance Rate6,199of26,314submissions,24%

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