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Stigmergic Coordination in Wikipedia

Published: 22 August 2018 Publication History

Abstract

We look for evidence of stigmergic coordination (i.e., coordination mediated by changes to a shared work product) in the context of Wikipedia. Using a novel approach to identifying edits to the same part of a Wikipedia article, we show that a majority of edits to two example articles are not associated with discussion on the article Talk page, suggesting the possibility of stigmergic coordination. However, discussion does seem to be related to article quality, suggesting the limits to this approach to coordination.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
OpenSym '18: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Open Collaboration
August 2018
208 pages
ISBN:9781450359368
DOI:10.1145/3233391
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: 22 August 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Wikipedia
  2. coordination
  3. distributed groups
  4. on-line epistemic community
  5. stigmergy

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OpenSym '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 27 of 38 submissions, 71%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 108 of 195 submissions, 55%

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Photo Steward: A Deliberative Collective Intelligence Workflow for Validating Historical ArchivesProceedings of The ACM Collective Intelligence Conference10.1145/3582269.3615600(34-52)Online publication date: 6-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Complexity and CoordinationOrganized Complexity in Business10.1007/978-3-031-25237-2_8(175-216)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Smart Cities: Missing the Stigmergy?Knowledge Management for Regional Policymaking10.1007/978-3-031-15648-9_8(149-161)Online publication date: 2-Jan-2023
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  • (2021)Is Wikipedia Easy to Understand?: A Study Beyond Conventional Readability MetricsAdvances in Computational Collective Intelligence10.1007/978-3-030-88113-9_14(175-187)Online publication date: 27-Sep-2021
  • (2020)QWikiProceedings of the 16th International Symposium on Open Collaboration10.1145/3412569.3412576(1-12)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2020
  • (2020)Activity-selection Behavior and Optimal User-distribution in Q&A WebsitesComputational Collective Intelligence10.1007/978-3-030-63007-2_67(853-865)Online publication date: 23-Nov-2020
  • (2019)What's in the Content of Wikipedia's Article for Deletion Discussions?Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web Conference10.1145/3308560.3316750(1215-1223)Online publication date: 13-May-2019

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