Wisdom of crowds: the effect of participant composition and contribution behavior on Wikipedia article quality
Journal of Knowledge Management
ISSN: 1367-3270
Article publication date: 31 January 2020
Issue publication date: 12 March 2020
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the effect of participant composition and contribution behavior of the different types of participants on the quality of knowledge generation in online communities.
Design/methodology/approach
This study samples all the featured articles in Chinese Wikipedia and performs a Cox regression to reveal how participant composition and contribution behavior affect the quality of articles in different contexts.
Findings
The results show that an increase in the number of participants increases the possibility of either enhancing or reducing the article quality. In most cases, the greater the proportion of core members (people who frequently participate in editing), the higher the possibility of enhancing the article quality. Occasional participants’ editorial behavior hinders quality promotion, this negative effect weakens when such editorial behavior becomes more frequent.
Practical implications
The findings help to better leverage the role of online communities in practice and to achieve knowledge collaboration in a more efficient manner. For example, an appropriate centralized organizational form should be established in online communities to improve the efficiency of crowd contributions. And it is worth developing mechanism to encourage participants to frequently participate in editing the article.
Originality/value
This study contributes to the research on the organizational forms of online communities by showing the effect of participant composition and behavior in the new form of organizing on knowledge generation. This study also contributes to the research on wisdom of crowds by revealing who in a group of participants, in what context, and by what means influence knowledge generation.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge insightful feedback from professor Jun Zhai of Dalian Maritime University, as well as those from the participants at a number of conferences and seminars. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 71571025 and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 3132019353).
Citation
Lin, Y. and Wang, C. (2020), "Wisdom of crowds: the effect of participant composition and contribution behavior on Wikipedia article quality", Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. 24 No. 2, pp. 324-345. https://doi.org/10.1108/JKM-08-2019-0416
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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