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Wiki is a new form of information production and organization, which has become one of the most important knowledge resources. In recent years, with the increase of users in wikis, “free rider problem” has been serious. In order to motivate editors to contribute more to a wiki system, it is important to fully understand their contribution behavior. The purpose of this paper is to explore the law of dynamic contribution behavior of editors in wikis.

After developing a dynamic model of contribution behavior, the authors employed both the metrological and clustering methods to process the time series data. The experimental data were collected from Baidu Baike, a renowned Chinese wiki system similar to Wikipedia.

There are four categories of editors: “testers,” “dropouts,” “delayers” and “stickers.” Testers, who contribute the least content and stop contributing rapidly after editing a few articles. After editing a large amount of content, dropouts stop contributing completely. Delayers are the editors who do not stop contributing during the observation time, but they may stop contributing in the near future. Stickers, who keep contributing and edit the most content, are the core editors. In addition, there are significant time-of-day and holiday effects on the number of editors’ contributions.

By using the method of time series analysis, some new characteristics of editors and editor types were found. Compared with the former studies, this research also had a larger sample. Therefore, the results are more scientific and representative and can help managers to better optimize the wiki systems and formulate incentive strategies for editors.

To add new empirical knowledge to debates about social practices of peer production communities, and to conversations about bias and its implications for democracy. To help identify Wikipedia (WP) articles that are affected by systematic bias and hopefully help alleviate the impact of such bias on the general public, thus helping enhance both traditional (e.g. libraries) and online information services (e.g. Google) in ways that contribute to democracy. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned objectives.

Quantitatively, the authors identify edit-warring camps across many conflict zones of the English language WP, and profile and compare success rates and typologies of camp edits in the corresponding topic areas. Qualitatively, the authors analyze the edit war between two senior WP editors that resulted in imbalanced and biased articles throughout a topic area for such editorial characteristics through a close critical reading.

Through a large-scale quantitative study, the authors find that winner-take-all camps exhibit biasing editing behaviors to a much larger extent than the camps they successfully edit-war against, confirming findings of prior small-scale qualitative studies. The authors also confirm the employment of these behaviors and identify other behaviors in the successful silencing of traditional medicinal knowledge on WP by a scientism-biased senior WP editor through close reading.

WP sadly does, as previously claimed, appear to be a platform that represents the biased viewpoints of its most stridently opinionated Western white male editors, and routinely misrepresents scholarly work and scientific consensus, the authors find. WP is therefore in dire need of scholarly oversight and decolonization.

The authors independently verify findings from prior personal accounts of highly power-imbalanced fights of scholars against senior editors on WP through a third-party close reading of a much more power balanced edit war between senior WP editors. The authors confirm that these findings generalize well to edit wars across WP, through a large scale quantitative analysis of unbalanced edit wars across a wide range of zones of contention on WP.

In this article, I present an initial examination of Conservapedia; namely, the problems it identified in the Wikipedia project that made a split appear necessary and the principles it claims to follow. I then argue that Conservapedia is characterized by a “law-and-order” mindset. Finally, implications for the continued existence of Conservapedia in a polarized world are presented.

A content analysis of key Conservapedia documents was conducted.

The founders of Conservapedia took issue with Wikipedia over its supposed intolerance and inconsistency of thought. They developed a set of principles that attempted to reconcile open-mindedness with efficiency and an extreme point of view on certain subjects. Nevertheless, Conservapedia failed to produce a vibrant community, and its function today is more of a database of alt-right dogma controlled by a core group of supporters.

There has been little scholarly attention paid to the various offshoots of Wikipedia, including Conservapedia. This is unfortunate. These alternative wiki encyclopedias represent knowledge universes of their own and in an increasingly polarized world they are important phenomena to understand.

This is the ninth article on business and law (BSL) databases in a continuing series of articles summarising and commenting on new database products. Two companion articles have appeared, one covering science, technology and medicine (STM) in Online & CDROM Review vol. 21, no. 1 and the other covering social science, humanities, news and general (SSH) in Online & CDROM Review vol. 21, no. 2. The articles are based on the newly appearing database products in the Gale Directory of Databases. The Gale Directory of Databases (GDD) was created in January 1993 by merging Computer‐Readable Databases: A Directory and Data Sourcebook (CRD) together with the Directory of Online Databases (DOD) and the Directory of Portable Databases (DPD).

This study investigates why contributors to online volunteer organizations reduce activity or discontinue volunteering. First, this analysis, based on a survey of over a 100 English Wikipedia’s volunteers with the highest edit count, identifies a gap in the research on volunteers burnout/dropout, namely the importance of interpersonal conflict as an understudied yet highly significant factor. Second, this analysis has practical implications for the sustainability of the Wikipedia project. Third, this analysis should outline an underrepresented issue that if generalizable, may help other volunteer organizations identify a key area related to their volunteer burnout/dropout.

To introduce contributing editors of LHTN to our readers – where do they get their ideas and what range of professional responsibilities they current have is part of this interview.

The article is an interview of the contributing editors.

There are mammoth challenges in the nature of our work in large research libraries and staying informed and making what we do relevant to library users is definitely central to their thinking.

Trying to stay on top of new trends and technologies and contributing to an infrastructure that is user‐centered are common themes in this interview.

Making collections accessible and the resources of the online catalog and its records as flawless as possible is not an easy task as shared by the subjects of this interview.

Purpose–To introduce a new Contributing Editor, who will cover the Public Library Beat. She has scout‐like instincts offering new programs and means of delivering information and communicating with users. Thinking about constant improvement and needed changes, she also has to anticipate what the next decade and even stretching the future to 15 years out will demand of library resources to meet expectations in an era best described as “dealing with ambivalence and coping with change”. Design/methodology/approach–The article is in the form of an interview. Findings–High energy, huge commitment, service oriented, staying focused, remaining relevant come to mind in describing the subject of this interview. Adjectives and descriptors pour out like curious, collaborative, innovative, willing to try and big picture are apparent as the interview unveils itself. Practical implications–This interview with a Systems Librarian in a Public Library demystifies the images of public librarianship and demonstrates how forward thinking and progressive the staff there must be to constantly justify themselves as a recipient of public funds. With constant population shifts and responding to new information formats, the challenges are endless, yet the rewards seem to be many and personally significant. Likely outcomes include the great new coverage public libraries will get in future issues. Originality/Value–Shanes the news of a new editor.