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Etiquette in Wikipedia: weening new editors into productive ones

Published: 27 August 2012 Publication History

Abstract

Currently, the greatest challenge faced by the Wikipedia community involves reversing the decline of active editors on the site -- in other words, ensuring that the encyclopedia's contributors remain sufficiently numerous to fill the roles that keep it relevant. Due to the natural drop-off of old contributors, newcomers must constantly be socialized, trained and retained. However recent research has shown the Wikipedia community is failing to retain a large proportion of productive new contributors and implicates Wikipedia's semi-automated quality control mechanisms and their interactions with these newcomers as an exacerbating factor. This paper evaluates the effectiveness of minor changes to the normative warning messages sent to newcomers from one of the most prolific of these quality control tools (Huggle) in preserving their rate of contribution. The experimental results suggest that substantial gains in newcomer participation can be attained through inexpensive changes to the wording of the first normative message that new contributors receive.

References

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W. Foundation. Editor trends study. http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Editor_Trends_Study, October 2010.
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W. Foundation. Summer of research summary of findings. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Wikimedia_Summer_of_Research_2011/Summary_of_Findings, September 2011.
[3]
R. S. Geiger and D. Ribes. The work of sustaining order in wikipedia: the banning of a vandal. In Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, CSCW '10, pages 117--126, New York, NY, USA, 2010. ACM.
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S. Geiger, A. Halfaker, M. Pinchuk, and S. Walling. Defense mechanism or socialization tactic? improving wikipedia's notifications to rejected contributors. In The 6th International AAAI Conference ON Weblogs And Social Media, ICWSM '12, 2012.
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A. Halfaker, A. Kittur, and J. Riedl. 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 '11, pages 163--172, New York, NY, USA, 2011. ACM.
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B. Suh, G. Convertino, E. H. Chi, and P. Pirolli. The singularity is not near: slowing growth of wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, WikiSym '09, pages 8:1--8:10, New York, NY, USA, 2009. ACM.
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D. Taraborelli. New user registrations. http://toolserver.org/~dartar/reg2/, July 2012.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WikiSym '12: Proceedings of the Eighth Annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration
    August 2012
    295 pages
    ISBN:9781450316057
    DOI:10.1145/2462932
    • General Chair:
    • Cliff Lampe
    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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    Publication History

    Published: 27 August 2012

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    Author Tags

    1. Huggle
    2. Wikipedia
    3. newcomers
    4. retention
    5. vandalism
    6. wiki

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    WikiSym '12 Paper Acceptance Rate 21 of 37 submissions, 57%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 145 submissions, 48%

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    • (2023)Multi-Platform Content Creation: The Configuration of Creator Ecology through Platform Prioritization, Content Synchronization, and Audience ManagementProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581106(1-19)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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    • (2016)Bring on Board New Enthusiasts! A Case Study of Impact of Wikipedia Art + Feminism Edit-A-Thon Events on NewcomersSocial Informatics10.1007/978-3-319-47880-7_2(24-40)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2016
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