ABSTRACT
An understanding of participation dynamics within online production communities requires an examination of the roles assumed by participants. Recent studies have established that the organizational structure of such communities is not flat; rather, participants can take on a variety of well-defined functional roles. What is the nature of functional roles? How have they evolved? And how do participants assume these functions? Prior studies focused primarily on participants' activities, rather than functional roles. Further, extant conceptualizations of role transitions in production communities, such as the Reader to Leader framework, emphasize a single dimension: organizational power, overlooking distinctions between functions. In contrast, in this paper we empirically study the nature and structure of functional roles within Wikipedia, seeking to validate existing theoretical frameworks. The analysis sheds new light on the nature of functional roles, revealing the intricate "career paths" resulting from participants' role transitions.
- Amrit, C. and van Hillegersberg, J., "Exploring the impact of socio-technical core-periphery structures in open source software development," journal of information technology, 25, 216--229, 2010.Google Scholar
- Arazy, O. and Gellatly, I., "Corporate Wikis: The Effects of Owners' Motivation and Behavior on Group Members' Engagement,," Journal of Management Information Systems, 29, 87--116, 2013.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Arazy, O., Nov, O., and Ortega, F., "The {Wikipedia} World is Not Flat: on the organizational structure of online production communities," in The 22nd European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS'2014), Tel-Aviv, Israel, 2014.Google Scholar
- Arazy, O., Nov, O., Patterson, R., and Yeo, L., "Information quality in Wikipedia: The effects of group composition and task conflict," Journal of Management Information Systems, 27, 71--98, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Arazy, O., Stroulia, E., Ruecker, S., Arias, C., Fiorentino, C., Ganev, V., et al., "Recognizing contributions in wikis: Authorship categories, algorithms, and visualizations," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 61, 1166--1179, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Arazy, O., Yeo, L., and Nov, O., "Stay on the Wikipedia Task: when task-related disagreements slip into personal and procedural conflicts," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 64, 1634--1648, 2013.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Arthur, M. B., "The boundaryless career," Journal of Organizational Behavior, 15, 295--306, 1994.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Baker, W. E. and Faulkner, R. R., "Role as resource in the Hollywood film industry," American Journal of Sociology, 97, 279--309, 1991.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Benkler, Y., The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom: Yale Univ Press, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Blau, J. R., Coser, R. L., and Goodman, N., Social Roles & Social Institutions. New Jersey, USA: Transaction Publishers, 1995.Google Scholar
- Borgatti, S. P. and Everett, M. G., "Models of core/periphery structures," Social networks, 21, 375--395, 2000.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bryant, S., Forte, A., and Bruckman, A., "Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia," in international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, 2005, 1--10. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Burke, M. and Kraut, R., "Mopping up: modeling wikipedia promotion decisions," in Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), San Diego, California, USA, 2008, 27--36. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Butler, B., Joyce, E., and Pike, J., "Don't look now, but we've created a bureaucracy: the nature and roles of policies and rules in wikipedia," in Proceedings of the CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, Florence, Italy, 2008, 1101--1110. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Butler, B., Sproull, L., Kiesler, S., and Kraut, R., "Community effort in online groups: Who does the work and why?," in Leadership at a Distance: Research in Technologically-Supported Work, ed Hillsdale, NJ, USA: L. Erlbaum Associates Inc., 2002, 346--362.Google Scholar
- Butler, B., Sproull, S., Kiesler, S., and Kraut, R. E., "Community effort in online communities: who does the work and why," in Leadership at a Distance Research in TechnologicallySupported Work, S. Weisband, Ed., ed London UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007, 171--194.Google Scholar
- Collier, B., Burke, M., Kittur, N., and Kraut, R., "Retrospective versus prospective evidence for promotion: The case of Wikipedia," in 2008 annual meeting of the Academy of Management, 2008.Google Scholar
- Collier, B., Burke, M., Kittur, N., and Kraut, R., "Promoting Good Management: Governance, Promotion, and Leadership in Open Collaboration Communities," presented at the International Conference on Information Systems, St. Louis, USA, 2010.Google Scholar
- Collier, B. and Kraut, R., "Leading the Collective: Social Capital and the Development of Leaders in Core-Periphery Organizations," presented at the Collective Intelligence, MIT, Boston, MA, USA, 2012.Google Scholar
- Crowston, K., Wei, K., Li, Q., and Howison, J., "Core and Periphery in Free/Libre and Open Source Software Team Communications," Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dahlander, L. and O'Mahony, S., "Progressing to the center: Coordinating project work," Organization science, 22, 961--979, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Denning, P. J. and Yaholkovsky, P., "Getting to 'We': Solidarity, not software, generates collaboration," Communications of the ACM, 51, 19--24, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Forte, A. and Lampe, C., "Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Open Collaboration: Lessons From the Literature," American Behavioral Scientist, 57, 535--547, 2013.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Forte, A., Larco, V., and Bruckman, A., "Decentralization in Wikipedia governance," Journal of Management Information Systems, 26, 49--72, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Geiger, R. S., "Are computers merely supporting cooperative work: towards an ethnography of bot development," in Proceedings of the 16th conference on computer supported cooperative work (CSCW'2013), San Antonio, Texas, USA, 2013, 51--56. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Halfaker, A., Geiger, R. S., Morgan, J. T., and Riedl, J., "The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia's reaction to popularity is causing its decline," American Behavioral Scientist, p. 0002764212469365, 2012.Google Scholar
- Ibarra, H., Working identity: Unconventional strategies for reinventing your career. Harvard Business Press, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jang, S., Arazy, O., Nov, O., and Brainin, E., "'Crowding Out' in Corporate Wikis: the Effects of Job Responsibility and Motivation on Participation," in 6th Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (MCIS'2011), Cyprus, 2010.Google Scholar
- Kittur, A., Suh, B., and Chi, E. H., "What's in Wikipedia? Mapping topics and conflict using socially annotated category structure," in 27th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2009), Boston, MA, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kriplean, T., Beschastnikh, I., and McDonald, D. W., "Articulations of wikiwork: uncovering valued work in wikipedia through barnstars," in Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, San Diego, CA, USA, 2008, 47--56. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Lave, J. and Wenger, E., Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lerner, J., "Role assignments," in Network analysis, U. Brandes and T. Erlebach, Eds., Springer, 2005, 216--252.Google Scholar
- Leskovec, J., Huttenlocher, D., and Kleinberg, J., "Governance in Social Media: A case study of the Wikipedia promotion process," in AAAI International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM'10), 2010.Google Scholar
- Liu, J. and Ram, S., "Who does what: Collaboration patterns in the Wikipedia and their impact on article quality," ACM Trans. Manage. Inf. Syst., 2, 1--23, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Long, Y. and Siau, K., "Social network structures in open source software development teams," Journal of Database Management, 18, 25--40, 2007.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Luther, K., Fiesler, C., and Bruckman, A., "Redistributing leadership in online creative collaboration," in Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work, 2013, 1007--1022. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Merton, R. K., Social theory and social structure. New York, NY, USA: Simon and Schuster, 1968.Google Scholar
- Meyer, J. W. and Rowan, B., "Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony," American journal of sociology, 83, 340--363, 1977.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Miles, R. E., Snow, C. C., Meyer, A. D., and Coleman, H. J., "Organizational strategy, structure, and process," Academy of management review, 3, 546--562, 1978.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mintzberg, H., "The structuring of organizations: A synthesis of the research," University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership Historical Research Reference in Entrepreneurship, 1979.Google Scholar
- Morell, M. F., "Governance of online creation communities: Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons," PhD, European University Institute, 2010.Google Scholar
- Niederer, S. and Van Dijck, J., "Wisdom of the crowd or technicity of content? Wikipedia as a sociotechnical system," New Media & Society, 12, 1368--1387, 2010.Google ScholarCross Ref
- O'Mahony, S. and Ferraro, F., "The emergence of governance in an open source community," Academy of Management Journal, 50, 1079--1106, 2007.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Oreg, S. and Nov, O., "Exploring motivations for contributing to open source initiatives: The roles of contribution context and personal values," Computers in Human Behavior, 24, 2055--2073, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ortega, F., Izquierdo-Cortazar, D., Gonzalez-Barahona, J. M., and Robles, G., "On the analysis of contributions from privileged users in virtual open communities," in Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'2009) Waikoloa, Big Island, HI, USA, 2009, 1--10. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Panciera, K., Halfaker, A., and Terveen, L., "Wikipedians are born, not made: A study of power editors on Wikipedia," presented at the GROUP, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Preece, J., Nonnecke, B., and Andrews, D., "The top five reasons for lurking: improving community experiences for everyone," Computers in human behavior, 20, 201--223, 2004.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Preece, J. and Shneiderman, B., "The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating technology-mediated social participation," AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 1, 13--32, 2009.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ransbotham, S. and Kane, G. C., "Membership Turnover and Collaboration Success in Online Communities," MIS Quarterly, 35, 613--627, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Riehle, D., Ellenberger, J., Menahem, T., Mikhailovski, B., Natchetoi, Y., et al., "Open collaboration within corporations using software forges," IEEE Software, 26, 52--58, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Roberts, J., Hann, I., and Slaughter, S., "Understanding the Motivations, Participation, and Performance of Open Source Software Developers," Managenent Science, 52, 984--999, 2006. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Robles, G., Gonzalez-Barahona, J. M., and Herraiz, I., "Evolution of the core team of developers in libre software projects," in Proceedings of the 6th IEEE International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'09), Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2009, 167--170. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sanger, L., "The early history of Nupedia and Wikipedia: a memoir," Open sources, 2, 307--338, 2005.Google Scholar
- Shaw, A. and Hill, B. M., "Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production," Journal of Communication, 64, 215--238, 2014.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Stvilia, B., Twidale, M., Smith, L., and Gasser, L., "Information quality work organization in Wikipedia," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 59, 983--1001, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Von Hippel, E. and Von Krogh, G., "Open source software and the 'private-collective' innovation model," Organization Science, 14, 209--223, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Welser, H. T., Cosley, D., Kossinets, G., Lin, A., Dokshin, F., Gay, G., et al., "Finding social roles in Wikipedia," in Proceedings of the 2011 iConference, Seattle, WA, USA, 2011, 122--129. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Welser, H. T., Gleave, E., Fisher, D., and Smith, M., "Visualizing the signatures of social roles in online discussion groups," Journal of social structure, 8, 1--32, 2007.Google Scholar
- Wenger, E., Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge university press, 1999.Google Scholar
- Zhu, H., Kraut, R., and Kittur, A., "Effectiveness of shared leadership in online communities," in Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2012, 407--416. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zhu, H., Kraut, R. E., Wang, Y.-C., and Kittur, A., "Identifying shared leadership in Wikipedia," in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2011, 3431--3434. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Functional Roles and Career Paths in Wikipedia
Recommendations
The Roles Bots Play in Wikipedia
Bots are playing an increasingly important role in the creation of knowledge in Wikipedia. In many cases, editors and bots form tightly knit teams. Humans develop bots, argue for their approval, and maintain them, performing tasks such as monitoring ...
On the "How" and "Why" of Emergent Role Behaviors in Wikipedia
CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social ComputingResearch on peer-production suggests that as participants choose what actions to perform, prototypical activity patterns emerge. Recent work characterized these patterns and demonstrated that informal emergent roles are highly stable. Nonetheless, we ...
Functional and semantic roles in a high-level knowledge representation language
We describe in this paper a formalization of the notion of "role" that involves a clear separation between two very different sorts of roles. Semantic roles, like student or customer, are seen as (pre-defined) transitory properties that can be ...
Comments