Hi, James!
Thanks for the link to your paper. It was interesting reading.
I think your observations about FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) are very relevant also to Wikipedia. WP has many of the same characteristics, as both are based on "information objects", an WP edit is pretty much the same as a FLOSS patch, WP has revision control just as FLOSS has CVS, and, with the introduction of the new feedback mechanism, WP will have something moving in the general direction of the issue/bug tracker of FLOSS. The significant difference between WP and FLOSS is the scale. As you observed, FLOSS projects have quite small numbers of contributors, clearly WP has a lot lot more. However, with respect to an average WP article, the number of the contributors is perhaps closer to that of a FLOSS project, still bigger though.
The observations of how work is done in FLOSS are fairly true of WP as well. I think most WP editors like to work on topics that interest them in some way (that's the utility) and do so in bite-sized chunks that fit the time they are willing to invest. WP editors do seem slightly more willing to rewrite whole articles (or large sections of them) than doing "version 2" in a FLOSS project but, then, articles are typically smaller than FLOSS code bases so it is not as big a task as a complete refactoring of a code base.
What WP appears to have is more people willing to do the "housekeeping", those committed editors who roam around adding geo-locations and infoboxes and categories and standardising the capitalisation of article titles and the recent change patrol and the admins, etc. It is less clear to me what the "utility" they are getting from their efforts (some might be control freaks but I suspect the majority are just genuinely motivated by altruism -- a utility in itself). I guess these are the "polishers" in FLOSS and probably, in percentage terms, they exist in similar proportions and hence are more visible in WP because of its greater scale.
And I think the low level of "co-work" in FLOOS is equivalent to the long tail of WP editors that I suspect just edit and never look at a talk page or the edit history.
Now to return to your question "What's at stake here?". I think the answer to that is pretty simple. The WWW provides the basis for collaboration/cooperation/coordination (whatever you like to call it and define it) on a scale previously unimaginable. Just look at Google, Facebook, eBay etc to see how the scale of doing anything can change with the WWW. However, socially, we only have the management tools to work at a much smaller scale, especially with volunteers. Indeed, I recently did some work with a sector (that I won't name) but which has a lot of people willing to volunteer -- however, they make very little use of the volunteers in practice because (amongst other reasons) they find there is too high a staff cost in managing the volunteers. The reason Wikipedia fascinates me (as a subject of study -- it fascinates me just to read it too) is that it has found a way to harness the largely uncoordinated efforts of many volunteers into a phenomenally effective resource. Sure, we know there is a small core of employees, but it's small dollars compared to the equivalent dollar-value of the leisure time of the volunteers (yep, economists know how to put a value on everything!). And of course, it's not just volunteers, many organisations would like to know how to reduce all those layers of middle management -- the ideal corporate world would surely be an army of workers at the coalface managed by just the CEO.
So if you can figure out the social and technical models for efficient and effective mass collaboration and then translate that into the software system to underpin it, then I think you've got a winner on your hands that could impact into so many spheres of our lives.
Now, a lot of people have taken a simplistic view that Wikipedia has proved that wikis are good for harnessing the power of a world of volunteers and started rolling out wikis for other purposes (indeed, often using a customised version of Wikipedia's own code base since it too is freely available). Some of these have achieved their purpose, others haven't. I don't think the "secret ingredient" is just "wiki" technology. Indeed, James' paper talks about what happens when an organisation tries to do "open source" internally, which often fails because the social context is different. I think the answer is to find the patterns of social/technical that succeed and, for this purpose, studying WP and other successful large-scale WWW sites is highly informative. For example, why does Amazon beat other online book retailers hands down? The prevailing wisdom is that the users have invested in Amazon through contributing reviews, ratings, lists, etc, whereas most online book sellers are just "flogging" products with reviews supplied by the publishers. Why does Facebook succeed? Why does eBay succeed? Or TripAdvisor? Clearly these sites are different to WP, e.g. some are "for profit", and not all have such a noble purpose (I like to think I do the world a bigger favour by writing for WP than selling my sofa). Indeed, many would question that there was any purpose or benefit to Facebook :-)
Equally WP has revealed problems/issues with mass collaboration over the years, e.g. edit wars, vandalism, "nazi" administrators, libellous content, controversial topics, multi-lingual, multi-cultural, when to use British vs American spelling, low participation by females and the Global South (I hate that term), quality-vs-quantity, breaking news, etc. But none of these have killed WP; it's found a way to cope well enough with many of them. Clearly these issues aren't unique to WP (e.g. we have strategies for managing many of them in traditional non-WWW contexts), but simply WP has had to deal with them on a more massive and global scale (there's no court-and-prison solution for WP vandalism). There's a lot to learn from WP so long as you look for the bigger patterns and don't fixate on specific solutions.
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of James Howison Sent: Wednesday, 25 July 2012 4:14 AM To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting
I think this is a fascinating discussion :)
What's at stake here? What do we gain or loose by calling something collaboration or not doing so? I think part of what's at stake is the ease with which one can generalize. When we say that work in Wikipedia (or Open Source) is collaboration we imply that other work that we understand as collaboration can likely learn from Wikipedia. It's somehow similar enough. If we say (for some reason) that a way of working is not collaboration (or cooperation) then we somehow loose an easy, natural way to make these justifications for research. We have to work a bit harder to make the argument but it helps us be more specific about what might transfer (and what might not).
For example, if we accept the idea that some core-ish group are "collaborating" then if we want to learn from Wikipedia for, say traditional virtual teams in organizations, then we might argue that there is adequate similarity in terms of (say) reciprocal interdependence, helping-behaviors or leadership. Conversely if we accept the idea that the long-tail are working (pseudo)-stigmatically we face a choice: do we just ignore them when we try to learn something transferable, or (more likely) seek to learn something else. Say about how a combination of technology and task-design facilitates such long-tail, stigmergic contributions? Thus learning less about managing teams/teamwork and more about (re)-designing tasks/taskwork.
The second approach is what Kevin Crowston and I take in an article about open source that is, we hope (!) coming out soon where we call this separate but collective work "collaboration through open superposition" (working paper here http://james.howison.name/pubs/CollaborationThroughSuperposition-WorkingPape r.pdf ) I'd be fascinated to hear how much (if any) of the thinking in there people think applies to Wikipedia.
Cheers, James