These same patterns have been noted for decades in studies of volunteerism, charitable giving, community association, face-to-face support groups, and voluntary religious organizations.  They are a consequences of the interaction of human interests/motivations and competition for limited attention/effort playing out at a population level.

Is there really any reason to expect that they wouldn't still work that way?  
(or actually be made "worse" -- because online environments make the costs of exploration lower, switching from one activity/group to another lower, and the number of alternatives higher).

Brian Butler
UMD, iSchool


On Jan 6, 2015, at 4:20 PM, Jonathan Morgan wrote:

This from Ars[1]. Sound familiar?

  • "The top 10 percent of contributors end up supplying an average of about 80 percent of the total effort put into these projects."
  • "Most people who show up to check out a project never return. The most compelling projects still saw 60 percent of their users stop by for a single visit and never come back; the worst case was an 83-percent rate."
  • "The topic of the project also seemed to have some effect [on participation rates]. The biggest project... lets users sift through Kepler telescope data to search for exoplanets; that attracted almost 30,000 users in its first 180 days. The smallest, Galaxy Zoo Supernova (which is no longer active) only drew a bit over 3,000."
Original manuscript [2] (paywalled). Anyone have subscription access?



--
Jonathan T. Morgan
Community Research Lead
Wikimedia Foundation

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