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Viable online communities: references
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CiteULike: dartar's online_communities
- Analyzing patterns of user content generation in online social networks
In KDD '09: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (2009), pp. 369-378.
Various online social networks (OSNs) have been developed rapidly on the Internet. Researchers have analyzed different properties of such OSNs, mainly focusing on the formation and evolution of the networks as well as the information propagation over the networks. In knowledge-sharing OSNs, such as blogs and question answering systems, issues on how users participate in the network and how users "generate/contribute" knowledge are vital to the sustained and healthy growth of the networks. However, related discussions have not been reported in the research literature.
Lei Guo, Enhua Tan, Songqing Chen, Xiaodong Zhang, Yihong Zhao
- Governance in Social Media: A case study of the Wikipedia promotion process
In Proceedings of the 4th Annual Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2010) (2010)
J Leskovec, D Huttenlocher, J Kleinberg
- Démographie des communautés en ligne. Le cas des wikis
Réseaux, Vol. 26, No. 152. (31 December 2008), pp. 205-240.
Les wikis et notamment la Wikipedia sont un des exemples les plus saillants de communautés en ligne de construction collective et collaborative de contenus. Si la Wikipedia a à cet égard jusqu’ici concentré l’essentiel des efforts de recherche, l’ensemble des wikis constitue cependant un écosystème d’une grande diversité de contenus, de populations, d’usages et de systèmes de gouvernance. De nombreux wikis luttent ainsi pour survivre et attirer contributeurs et articles de qualité. Notre étude constitue la première analyse quantitative et démographique d’un grand échantillon de wikis. Nous nous intéressons en particulier aux corrélations potentielles entre la dynamique démographique certaines propriétés liées à la structure au mode de gouvernance des wikis. Ceci nous permet finalement d’introduire et de discuter plusieurs axes d’étude de la viabilité des communautés en ligne. Wikis are the most prominent example of online communities of collaborative content creation, of which Wikipedia is the largest and most famous. The primacy of research on Wikipedia in the literature has eclipsed the study of the wiki ecosystem, which actually displays a wide variety of demographics, usage patterns, governance, content and population dynamics. Many wikis struggle to survive, competing against one another for quality and contributors, growing in content and population or, conversely, threatened by inactivity or vandalism. This paper is the first empirical assessment of a large sample of wikis, their structure and their evolution over time. We analyse the correlation of various macroscopic indicators, structural features and governance policies of wikis with specific growth patterns, and discuss possible future research on the viability of online communities.
Camille Roth, Dario Taraborelli, Nigel Gilbert
- Beyond Wikipedia: coordination and conflict in online production groups
In CSCW '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (2010), pp. 215-224.
Online production groups have the potential to transform the way that knowledge is produced and disseminated. One of the most widely used forms of online production is the wiki, which has been used in domains ranging from science to education to enterprise. We examined the development of and interactions between coordination and conflict in a sample of 6811 wiki production groups. We investigated the influence of four coordination mechanisms: intra-article communication, inter-user communication, concentration of workgroup structure, and policy and procedures. We also examined the growth of conflict, finding the density of users in an information space to be a significant predictor. Finally, we analyzed the effectiveness of the four coordination mechanisms on managing conflict, finding differences in how each scaled to large numbers of contributors. Our results suggest that coordination mechanisms effective for managing conflict are not always the same as those effective for managing task quality, and that designers must take into account the social benefits of coordination mechanisms in addition to their production benefits.
Aniket Kittur, Robert Kraut
- Decentralization in Wikipedia Governance
Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 26, No. 1. (1 July 2009), pp. 49-72.
How does "self-governance" happen in Wikipedia? Through in-depth interviews with 20 individuals who have held a variety of responsibilities in the English-language Wikipedia, we obtained rich descriptions of how various forces produce and regulate social structures on the site. Although Wikipedia is sometimes portrayed as lacking oversight, our analysis describes Wikipedia as an organization with highly refined policies, norms, and a technological architecture that supports organizational ideals of consensus building and discussion. We describe how governance on the site is becoming increasingly decentralized as the community grows and how this is predicted by theories of commons-based governance developed in offline contexts. We also briefly examine local governance structures called WikiProjects through the example of WikiProject Military History, one of the oldest and most prolific projects on the site.
Andrea Forte, Vanesa Larco, Amy Bruckman
- Cohesion and Membership Duration: Linking Groups, Relations and Individuals in an Ecology of Affiliation
In Group Cohesion Trust and Solidarity (2002)
Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin
- Social Cohesion
Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 30, No. 1. (2004), pp. 409-425.
Investigators interested in developing a general theory of social cohesion are confronted with a complex body of work that involves various definitions of social cohesion, specialized literatures on particular dimensions of social cohesion (e.g., membership turnover, organizational commitment, categorical identifications, interpersonal attachments, network structures), and lines of inquiry focused on the social cohesion of specific types of groups (e.g., families, schools, military units, and sports teams). This review addresses the problem of integrating the individual and group levels at which social cohesion has been defined. It also develops a perspective on social cohesion as a domain of causally interrelated phenomena concerned with individuals' membership attitudes and behaviors, in which the major dimensions of social cohesion occupy different theoretical positions with respect to one another as antecedent, intervening, or outcome variables.
Noah Friedkin
- Recognition and participation in a virtual community
System Sciences, 2004. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Hawaii International Conference on (2004), 10 pp..
Although recognition counts among the numerous factors that contribute towards the success of virtual communities, it has received little attention in both academic and practitioner studies. Adopting the theory of information sharing as the conceptual foundation, this interpretive case study examines the effect of recognition on participation in a virtual community for academic dress. Results indicate that there exist three different forms of perceived recognition in a virtual community, namely identity, expertise and tangible recognition. The study also highlights that a link exists across these forms of recognition, their effects, and participation. Implications for community organizers and researchers are discussed.
CML Chan, M Bhandar, Lih-Bin Oh, Hock-Chuan Chan
- Encouraging participation in virtual communities
Commun. ACM, Vol. 50, No. 2. (February 2007), pp. 68-73.
Leaders of robust, sustainable virtual communities find ways tostrengthen their members' sense of social identity and motivate their participation in the community's activities.
Joon Koh, Young Kim, Brian Butler, Gee Bock
- Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans
Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Vol. 16, No. 04. (1993), pp. 681-694.
Group size covaries with relative neocortical volume in nonhuman primates. This regression equation predicts a group size for modern humans very similar to that for hunter-gatherer and traditional horticulturalist societies. Similar group sizes are found in other contemporary and historical societies. Nonhuman primates maintain group cohesion through social grooming; among the Old World monkeys and apes, social grooming time is linearly related to group size. Maintaining stability of human-sized groups by grooming alone would make intolerable time demands. It is therefore suggested (1) that the evolution of large groups in the human lineage depended on developing a more efficient method for time-sharing the processes of social bonding and (2) that language uniquely fulfills this requirement. Data on the size of conversational and other small interacting groups of humans accord with the predicted relative efficiency of conversation compared to grooming as a bonding process. In human conversations about 60% of time is spent gossiping about relationships and personal experiences. Language may accordingly have evolved to allow individuals to learn about the behavioural characteristics of other group members more rapidly than was feasible by direct observation alone.
RIM Dunbar
- The Hidden Order of Wikipedia
Online Communities and Social Computing (2007), pp. 445-454.
We examine the procedural side of Wikipedia, the well-known internet encyclopedia. Despite the lack of structure in the underlying wiki technology, users abide by hundreds of rules and follow well-defined processes. Our case study is the Featured Article (FA) process, one of the best established procedures on the site. We analyze the FA process through the theoretical framework of commons governance, and demonstrate how this process blends elements of traditional workflow with peer production. We conclude that rather than encouraging anarchy, many aspects of wiki technology lend themselves to the collective creation of formalized process and policy.
Fernanda Viégas, Martin Wattenberg, Matthew Mckeon
- An Ecology of Affiliation
American Sociological Review, Vol. 48, No. 4. (1983), pp. 519-532.
This paper develops an ecological model of the competition of social organizations for members. The concept of the ecological niche is quantified explicitly in a way which ties together geography, time, and the social composition of organizations. A differential equation model analogous to the Lotka-Volterra competition equations in biology captures the dynamics of the system. This dynamic model is related to the niche concept in a novel way, which produces an easily understood and powerful picture of the static and dynamic structure of the community. This new perspective provides a theoretical link between the aggregate macrostructural theory of Blau (1977a,b) and the microstructural dynamics of organizational demography (Pfeffer, 1983). The model is tested with data on organizations from a midwestern city.
Miller McPherson
- Herding the cats: the influence of groups in coordinating peer production
In WikiSym '09: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (2009), pp. 1-9.
Peer production systems rely on users to self-select appropriate tasks and "scratch their personal itch". However, many such systems require significant maintenance work, which also implies the need for collective action, that is, individuals following goals set by the group and performing good citizenship behaviors. How can this paradox be resolved? Here we examine one potential answer: the influence of social identification with the larger group on contributors' behavior. We examine Wikipedia, a highly successful peer production system, and find a significant and growing influence of group structure, with a prevalent example being the WikiProject. Comparison of editors who join projects with those who do not and comparisons of the joiners' behavior before and after they join a project suggest their identification with the group plays an important role in directing them towards group goals and good citizenship behaviors. Upon joining, Wikipedians are more likely to work on project-related content, to shift their contributions towards coordination rather than production work, and to perform maintenance work such as reverting vandalism. These results suggest that group influence can play an important role in maintaining the health of online communities, even when such communities are putatively self-directed peer production systems.
Aniket Kittur, Bryan Pendleton, Robert Kraut
- Working for Free? Motivations for Participating in Open-Source Projects
Int. J. Electron. Commerce, Vol. 6, No. 3. (2002), pp. 25-39.
The success of the Linux operating system has demonstrated the viability of open-source software, an alternative form of software development that challenges traditional assumptions about software markets. Understanding why developers participate in open-source projects is crucial for assessing the impact of open-source software. Their motivations fall into two broad categories: internal factors (e.g., intrinsic motivation, altruism) and external rewards (e.g., expected future returns, personal needs). The results of a survey administered to open-source programmers are summarized.
Alexander Hars, Shaosong Ou
- Motivation, Governance & the Viability of Hybrid Forms in Open Source Software Development
Social Science Research Network Working Paper Series (09 May 2006)
Open source software projects rely on the voluntary efforts of thousands of software developers, yet we know little about why developers choose to participate in this collective development process. This paper inductively derives a framework for understanding participation from the perspective of the individual software developer based on data from two software communities with different governance structures. In both communities, a need for software-related improvements drives initial participation. The majority of participants leave the community once their needs are met, however, a small subset remain involved. For this set of developers, motives evolve over time and participation becomes a hobby. These hobbyists are critical to the long-term viability of the software code: they take on tasks that might otherwise go undone and work to maintain the simplicity and modularity of the code. Governance structures affect the evolution of motives. Implications for firms interested in implementing "hybrid" strategies designed to combine the advantages of open source software development with proprietary ownership and control are discussed.
Sonali Shah
- Folks in folksonomies: Social link prediction from shared metadata
In WSDM’10: Proceedings of the Third ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (4-6 February 2010)
Web 2.0 applications have attracted a considerable amount of attention because their open-ended nature allows users to create lightweight semantic scaffolding to organize and share content. To date, the interplay of the social and semantic components of social media has been only partially explored. Here we focus on Flickr andLast.fm, two social media systems in which we can relate the tagging activity of the users with an explicit representation of their social network. We show that a substantial level of local lexical and topical alignment is observable among users who lie close toeach other in the social network. We introduce a null model that preserves user activity while removing local correlations, allowing us to disentangle the actual local alignment between users from statistical effects due to the assortative mixing of user activity and centrality in the social network. This analysis suggests that users with similar topical interests are more likely to be friends, and therefore semantic similarity measures among users based solely on their annotation metadata should be predictive of social links. We test thishypothesis on the Last.fm data set, confirming that the social network constructed from semantic similarity captures actual friendship more accurately than Last.fm’s suggestions based on listening patterns.
Rossano Schifanella, Alain Barrat, Ciro Cattuto, Benjamin Markines, Filippo Menczer
- Novelty and collective attention.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 104, No. 45. (6 November 2007), pp. 17599-17601.
The subject of collective attention is central to an information age where millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus of interest to understand how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among large populations. We have analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among 1 million users of an interactive web site, digg.com, devoted to thousands of novel news stories. The observations can be described by a dynamical model characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements indicate that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law, suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades.
Fang Wu, Bernardo Huberman
- A content-driven reputation system for the wikipedia
In WWW '07: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web (2007), pp. 261-270.
We present a content-driven reputation system for Wikipedia authors. In our system, authors gain reputation when the edits they perform to Wikipedia articles are preserved by subsequent authors, and they lose reputation when their edits are rolled back or undone in short order. Thus, author reputation is computed solely on the basis of content evolution; user-to-user comments or ratings are not used. The author reputation we compute could be used to flag new contributions from low-reputation authors, or it could be used to allow only authors with high reputation to contribute to controversialor critical pages. A reputation system for the Wikipedia could also provide an incentive for high-quality contributions. We have implemented the proposed system, and we have used it to analyze the entire Italian and French Wikipedias, consisting of a total of 691, 551 pages and 5, 587, 523 revisions. Our results show that our notion of reputation has good predictive value: changes performed by low-reputation authors have a significantly larger than average probability of having poor quality, as judged by human observers, and of being later undone, as measured by our algorithms.
Thomas Adler, Luca de Alfaro
- Assessing the quality of Wikipedia articles with lifecycle based metrics
In WikiSym '09: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (2009), pp. 1-10.
The main feature of the free online-encyclopedia Wikipedia is the wiki-tool, which allows viewers to edit the articles directly in the web browser. As a weakness of this openness for example the possibility of manipulation and vandalism cannot be ruled out, so that the quality of any given Wikipedia article is not guaranteed. Hence the automatic quality assessment has been becoming a high active research field. In this paper we offer new metrics for an efficient quality measurement. The metrics are based on the lifecycles of low and high quality articles, which refer to the changes of the persistent and transient contributions throughout the entire life span.
Thomas Wöhner, Ralf Peters
- Measuring the wikisphere
In WikiSym '09: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (2009), pp. 1-8.
Due to the inherent difficulty in obtaining experimental data from wikis, past quantitative wiki research has largely been focused on Wikipedia, limiting the degree that it can be generalized. We developed WikiCrawler, a tool that automatically downloads and analyzes wikis, and studied 151 popular wikis running Mediawiki (none of them Wikipedias). We found that our studied wikis displayed signs of collaborative authorship, validating them as objects of study. We also discovered that, as in Wikipedia, the relative contribution levels of users in the studied wikis were highly unequal, with a small number of users contributing a disproportionate amount of work. In addition, power-law distributions were successfully fitted to the contribution levels of most of the studied wikis, and the parameters of the fitted distributions largely predicted the high inequality that was found. Along with demonstrating our methodology of analyzing wikis from diverse sources, the discovered similarities between wikis suggest that most wikis accumulate edits through a similar underlying mechanism, which could motivate a model of user activity that is applicable to wikis in general.
Jeff Stuckman, James Purtilo
- Is Wikipedia growing a longer tail?
In GROUP '09: Proceedings of the ACM 2009 international conference on Supporting group work (2009), pp. 105-114.
Wikipedia has millions of articles, many of which receive little attention. One group of Wikipedians believes these obscure entries should be removed because they are uninteresting and neglected; these are the deletionists. Other Wikipedians disagree, arguing that this long tail of articles is precisely Wikipedia's advantage over other encyclopedias; these are the inclusionists. This paper looks at two overarching questions on the debate between deletionists and inclusionists: (1) What are the implications to the long tail of the evolving standards for article birth and death? (2) How is viewership affected by the decreasing notability of articles in the long tail? The answers to five detailed research questions that are inspired by these overarching questions should help better frame this debate and provide insight into how Wikipedia is evolving.
Shyong Tony, John Riedl
- The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia
In WikiSym '09: Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (2009), pp. 1-10.
Prior research on Wikipedia has characterized the growth in content and editors as being fundamentally exponential in nature, extrapolating current trends into the future. We show that recent editing activity suggests that Wikipedia growth has slowed, and perhaps plateaued, indicating that it may have come against its limits to growth. We measure growth, population shifts, and patterns of editor and administrator activities, contrasting these against past results where possible. Both the rate of page growth and editor growth has declined. As growth has declined, there are indicators of increased coordination and overhead costs, exclusion of newcomers, and resistance to new edits. We discuss some possible explanations for these new developments in Wikipedia including decreased opportunities for sharing existing knowledge and increased bureaucratic stress on the socio-technical system itself.
Bongwon Suh, Gregorio Convertino, Ed Chi, Peter Pirolli
- Beyond friendship graphs: a study of user interactions in Flickr
In WOSN '09: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Online social networks (August 2009), pp. 25-30.
Most of the existing literature on empirical studies of Online Social Networks (OSNs) have focused on characterizing and modeling the structure of their inferred friendship graphs. However, the friendship graph of an OSN does not demonstrate what fraction of its users actively interact with other users, how these users interact, and how these active users and their interactions evolve over time. In this paper, we characterize indirect fan-owner interactions through photos among users in a large photo-sharing OSN, namely Flickr. Our results show that a very small fraction of users in the main component of the friendship graph is responsible for the vast majority of fan-owner interactions; moreover, these interactions involve only a small fraction of photos in Flickr. We also characterize some of the temporal properties of fan arrival. For example, we show that there is no strong correlation between age and popularity of a photo and that most photos gain a majority of their fans during the first week after their posting. Overall, our findings provide new insights into the fan-owner interactions among Flickr users.
Masoud Valafar, Reza Rejaie, Walter Willinger
- Groupthink and Peer Pressure: Social Influence in Online Social Network Groups
In Proceeding International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) (July 2009)
In this paper, we present a horizontal view of social influence, more specifically a quantitative study of the influence of neighbours on the probability of a particular node to join a group, on four popular Online Social Networks (OSNs), namely Orkut, YouTube, LiveJournal, and Flickr. Neighbours in OSNs have a mutually acknowledged relation, most often defined as friendship, and they are directly connected on a graph of a social network. Users in OSNs can also join groups of users. These groups represent common areas of interest. We present a simple social influence model to describe and explain the group joining process of users on OSNs. To this end, we extract the social influence from data sets of OSNs of a million sample nodes. One of our findings is that a set of neighbours in the OSN is about 100 times more powerful in influencing a user to join a group than the same number of strangers.
Pan Hui, Sonja Buchegger
- Co-evolution of social and affiliation networks
In KDD '09: Proceedings of the 15th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (2009), pp. 1007-1016.
In our work, we address the problem of modeling social network generation which explains both link and group formation. Recent studies on social network evolution propose generative models which capture the statistical properties of real-world networks related only to node-to-node link formation. We propose a novel model which captures the co-evolution of social and affiliation networks. We provide surprising insights into group formation based on observations in several real-world networks, showing that users often join groups for reasons other than their friends. Our experiments show that the model is able to capture both the newly observed and previously studied network properties. This work is the first to propose a generative model which captures the statistical properties of these complex networks. The proposed model facilitates controlled experiments which study the effect of actors' behavior on the evolution of affiliation networks, and it allows the generation of realistic synthetic datasets.
Elena Zheleva, Hossam Sharara, Lise Getoor
- Preferential behavior in online groups
In WSDM '08: Proceedings of the international conference on Web search and web data mining (2008), pp. 117-128.
Online communities in the form of message boards, listservs, and newsgroups continue to represent a considerable amount of the social activity on the Internet. Every year thousands of groups ourish while others decline into relative obscurity; likewise, millions of members join a new community every year, some of whom will come to manage or moderate the conversation while others simply sit by the sidelines and observe. These processes of group formation, growth, and dissolution are central in social science, and in an online venue they have ramifications for the design and development of community software
Lars Backstrom, Ravi Kumar, Cameron Marlow, Jasmine Novak, Andrew Tomkins
- Stimulating social engagement in a community network
In CSCW '02: Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work (2002), pp. 306-313.
One of the most challenging problems facing builders and facilitators of community networks is to create and sustain social engagement among members. In this paper, we investigate the drivers of social engagement in a community network through the analysis of three data sources: activity logs, a member survey, and the content analysis of the conversation archives. We describe three important ways to encourage and support social engagement in online communities: through system design elements such as conversation channeling and event notification, by various selection criteria for community members, and through facilitation of specific kinds of discussion topics.
David Millen, John Patterson
- Modeling Participation in an Online Travel Community
Journal of Travel Research, Vol. 42, No. 3. (1 February 2004), pp. 261-270.
This study contributes to the understanding of online travel communities by extending and empirically testing a conceptual framework of online travel community member needs. Specifically, the relationships between member needs and their level of participation in an online travel community are examined; in addition, the effects of duration of membership on the level of participation and the role of demographic differences in terms of member needs and participation are explored. The results show that social and hedonic needs have positive effects on level of participation while functional need has a negative effect. Membership status had an influence on level of participation and demographic characteristics were found to play important roles in terms of member needs and participation in online communities. Implications of these findings are discussed as they provide important guidelines for the development of online travel communities. 10.1177/0047287503258824
Youcheng Wang, Daniel Fesenmaier
- Social Networks and Organizational Dynamics
American Sociological Review, Vol. 57, No. 2. (1992), pp. 153-170.
In this paper we develop and test a theory of the dynamic behavior of voluntary groups. The theory combines an image of social network structure with the concept of natural selection to model changes in group composition over time. We consider the group to be a population of members subject to natural selection in sociodemographic space. According to the theory, the probability that members will enter or leave the group depends upon the number and strength of social network ties that connect group members to each other and to nonmembers. We analyze an event history dataset constructed from interviews using the Life History Calendar method and information on ego-centered social networks developed from the General Social Survey Network Module. We test the hypothesis that network connections inside a group are associated with reduced membership turnover, while connections outside the group increase turnover. We find that weak ties and network connections that span greater distances in sociodemographic space are positively correlated with leaving current groups and joining new ones. We conclude that weak ties are a major source of change in group composition.
Miller McPherson, Pamela Popielarz, Sonja Drobnic
- Modeling and predicting group activity over time in online social media
In HT '09: Proceedings of the 20th ACM conference on Hypertext and hypermedia (2009), pp. 349-350.
This paper develops a probabilistic framework that can model and predict group activity over time on online social media. Users of social media sites such as Flickr often face the enormous challenge of which group to choose, due to the presence of numerous competing groups of similar content. Determining an empirical measure of significance of a group can help tackle this problem. The proposed framework therefore determines an optimal measure per group based on past user participation and interaction as well as likely future activity in the group. The framework is tested on a Flickr dataset and the results show that this method can yield satisfactory predictions of group activity. This implies that the computed measure of significance of a group can be used by end users to choose groups with rich activity.
Munmun De Choudhury