Viable online communities
Overview
One of the major issues facing socially-driven content and collaborative work on the Web (such as Wikipedia) is the lack of tools to measure at large scale the evolution of content (in terms of quality and quantity), to reduce the drop-out rate of active contributors or to detect vandalism in a timely manner. Collaborative projects typically die of inactivity for an insufficient number of valuable contributions or, conversely, whenever quality assessment becomes unmanageable due to content explosion or inappropriate measures against spam or vandalism. Governance of wiki-based communities has been based so far on a shared corpus of best practices and recommendations, due to the lack of tools to identify virtuous or potentially disruptive patterns in a timely and measurable way.Can we identify factors that determine the life and death of content-based online communities? How can communities in mutual competition secure their performance and the quality of their output? What is the relation between governance, content selectivity and growth of online communities?
The aim of this project is to study factors affecting the sustainability of content-based online communities and help develop policies to achieve or restore desired targets in content and population dynamics. Case studies for this project include content-based social networking services like Flickr and wiki-based communities.
Collaborators
- Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey
- Camille Roth, University of Toulouse
Host
![[cress]](images/mini/surrey.png "CRESS")
References
- Roth, C., Taraborelli, D., and Gilbert, N. (2008)
Measuring wiki viability. An empirical assessment of the social dynamics of a large sample of wikis.
Proceedings of the 2008 international symposium on Wikis - WikiSym 2008, Porto, Sep 2008.
pdf full text
Funding
This project is supported by a 2-year research grant from the European Network PATRES (NEST-043268).
research | papers & communications | teaching | erp | links | tools | cv | contact