"Welcome" Changes? Descriptive and Injunctive Norms in a Wikipedia Sub-Community
By Jonathan T. Morgan, Wikimedia Foundation and Anna Filippova, GitHub
Open online communities rely on social norms for behavior regulation, group cohesion, and sustainability. Research on the role of social norms online has mainly focused on one source of influence at a time, making it difficult to separate different normative influences and understand their interactions. In this study, we use the Focus Theory to examine interactions between several sources of normative influence in a Wikipedia sub-community: local descriptive norms, local injunctive norms, and norms imported from similar sub- communities. We find that exposure to injunctive norms has a stronger effect than descriptive norms, that the likelihood of performing a behavior is higher when both injunctive and descriptive norms are congruent, and that conflicting social norms may negatively impact pro-normative behavior. We contextualize these findings through member interviews, and discuss their implications for both future research on normative influence in online groups and the design of systems that support open collaboration.
The pipeline of online participation inequalities: The case of Wikipedia Editing
By Aaron Shaw, Northwestern University and Eszter Hargittai, University of Zurich
Participatory platforms like the Wikimedia projects have unique potential to facilitate more equitable knowledge production. However, digital inequalities such as the Wikipedia gender gap undermine this democratizing potential. In this talk, I present new research in which Eszter Hargittai and I conceptualize a "pipeline" of online participation and model distinct levels of awareness and behaviors necessary to become a contributor to the participatory web. We test the theory in the case of Wikipedia editing, using new survey data from a diverse, national sample of adult internet users in the U.S.
The results show that Wikipedia participation consistently reflects inequalities of education and internet experiences and skills. We find that the gender gap only emerges later in the pipeline whereas gaps along racial and socioeconomic lines explain variations earlier in the pipeline. Our findings underscore the multidimensionality of digital inequalities and suggest new pathways toward closing knowledge gaps by highlighting the importance of education and Internet skills.
We conclude that future research and interventions to overcome digital participation gaps should not focus exclusively on gender or class differences in content creation, but expand to address multiple aspects of digital inequality across pipelines of participation. In particular, when it comes to overcoming gender gaps in the case of Wikipedia, our results suggest that continued emphasis on recruiting female editors should include efforts to disseminate the knowledge that Wikipedia can be edited. Our findings support broader efforts to overcome knowledge- and skill-based barriers to entry among potential contributors to the open web.