Countering underproduction of peer produced goods

2024-05-16

New Media & Society

AI Summary

Peer production often suffers from underproduction—specifically, low-quality content on high-traffic articles. This study analyzes longitudinal panel data from English Wikipedia’s long-term contributor logs, employing individual fixed-effects models to identify two key behavioral patterns: (1) unregistered anonymous contributors disproportionately engage in filling gaps in popular articles; and (2) experienced editors dynamically shift their attention toward underappreciated, lower-visibility articles as their expertise accumulates. The study provides the first empirical evidence that preserving contributor diversity—particularly retaining anonymous contributors—significantly improves content quality in high-attention articles. These findings offer novel, actionable insights for platform designers seeking to reconcile traffic-driven incentives with editorial quality assurance, suggesting that inclusive incentive mechanisms—not solely reputation- or credential-based ones—are critical for sustaining knowledge commons quality.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Web
• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Causality

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data quality in the era of algorithmically-generated content
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship

Abstract

Peer produced goods, such as online knowledge bases and free/libre open source software rely on contributors who often choose their tasks regardless of consumer needs. These goods are susceptible to underproduction: when popular goods are relatively low quality. Although underproduction is a common feature of peer production, very little is known about how to counteract it. We use a detailed longitudinal dataset from English Wikipedia to show that more experienced contributors—including those who contribute without an account—tend to contribute to underproduced goods. A within-person analysis shows that contributors’ efforts shift toward underproduced goods over time. These findings illustrate the value of retaining contributors in peer production, including those contributing without accounts, as a means to counter underproduction.

Problem

• Addressing underproduction in peer-produced goods
• Examining contributor behavior in online knowledge bases
• Retaining experienced contributors to improve quality

Innovation

• Experienced contributors target underproduced goods
• Retaining contributors counters underproduction effectively
• Anonymous contributors also improve underproduced goods