Hello, everyone,
The next Research Showcase will be live-streamed on Wednesday, November 18, at 9:30 AM PST/17:30 UTC, and will be on the theme of interpersonal communication between editors. Interpersonal communication, for example via talk pages, plays a crucial role for editors to coordinate their efforts in online collaborative communities. For this month’s showcase we have invited 2 speakers sharing their research on getting a deeper understanding of interpersonal communication on Wikipedia. In the first talk, Anna Rader will give an overview on editors’ communication networks and patterns, and the different types of dynamics commonly found in the way that users interact. In the second talk, Sneha Narayan presents recent work investigating whether easier interpersonal communication leads to enhanced productivity and newcomer participation across more than 200 wikis.
YouTube stream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G35OEDJ53bY
As usual, you can join the conversation on IRC at #wikimedia-research. You can also watch our past research showcases here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Research/Showcase
This month's presentations:
Talk before you type - Interpersonal communication on Wikipedia
By Dr Anna Rader, Research Consultant
Formally, the work of Wikipedia’s community of volunteers is asynchronous and anarchic: around the world, editors labor individually and in disorganized ways on the collective project. Yet this work is also underscored by informal and vibrant interpersonal communication: in the lively exchanges of talk pages and the labor-sharing of editorial networks, anonymous strangers communicate their intentions and coordinate their efforts to maintain the world’s largest online encyclopaedia. This working paper offers an overview of academic research into editors’ communication networks and patterns, with a particular focus on the role of talk pages. It considers four communication dynamics of editor interaction: cooperation, deliberation, conflict and coordination; and reviews key recommendations for enhancing peer-to-peer communication within the Wikipedia community.
All Talk - How Increasing Interpersonal Communication on Wikis May Not Enhance Productivity
By Sneha Narayan, Assistant Professor, Carlton College
What role does interpersonal communication play in sustaining production in online collaborative communities? This paper sheds light on that question by examining the impact of a communication feature called "message walls" that allows for faster and more intuitive interpersonal communication in a population of wikis on Wikia. Using panel data from a sample of 275 wiki communities that migrated to message walls and a method inspired by regression discontinuity designs, we analyze these transitions and estimate the impact of the system's introduction. Although the adoption of message walls was associated with increased communication among all editors and newcomers, it had little effect on productivity, and was further associated with a decrease in article contributions from new editors. Our results imply that design changes that make communication easier in a social computing system may not always translate to increased participation along other dimensions.