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Crowd Diversity and Performance in Wikipedia: The Mediating Effects of Task Conflict and Communication

Published: 02 May 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Crowd diversity is a key attribute that impacts crowd performance in online collaboration systems. As a structural composition of a crowd, diversity is likely to influence crowd performance through communication processes during collaboration. This study examined how diversity influenced crowd performance under different conditions of task conflict and communication in Wikipedia article production. With a sample of 5,899 articles, we found that contribution diversity positively predicted crowd performance, whereas experience diversity was negatively related to performance. In addition, task communication and conflict partially mediated the relationship between crowd diversity and performance. Task communication positively predicted performance for both forms of diversity. Task conflict, on the other hand, was positively predicted by expertise diversity, but had negative associations with contribution diversity and performance. The findings help unpack the reasons for differential effects of diversity on crowd performance, and demonstrate the importance of including communication variables when studying online crowd collaboration.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '17: Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
May 2017
7138 pages
ISBN:9781450346559
DOI:10.1145/3025453
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 May 2017

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Author Tags

  1. communication
  2. conflict
  3. crowd performance
  4. diversity
  5. wikipedia

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CHI '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 600 of 2,400 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)The Relationship Between Team Diversity and Team Performance: Reconciling Promise and Reality Through a Comprehensive Meta-Analysis Registered ReportJournal of Business and Psychology10.1007/s10869-024-09977-039:6(1303-1354)Online publication date: 29-Aug-2024
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