Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2023-05-22/Recent research

A monthly overview of recent academic research about Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, also published as the Wikimedia Research Newsletter.

"A game-theoretic analysis of Wikipedia's peer production: The interplay between community's governance and contributors' interactions", published earlier this month in PLoS ONE, investigates what it calls fundamental but still unresolved questions about "the way in which governance shapes individual-level interactions" in peer production.

Specifically, the authors build a complex game theory model to answer the following two research questions about English Wikipedia, and validate its predictions empirically by examining the revision histories of 864 articles (up to 2012):

These concepts are operationalized as follows (among other variables used to construct the the quantitative model):

• "Owned" here refers to having authored text that persists in a Wikipedia article, surviving subsequent revisions (as opposed to ownership in the sense of contributors being entitled to a form of control over the content – a notion that, as the authors discuss, is explicitly discouraged by the community). An editor's utility – i.e. the benefit that they derive from contributing to Wikipedia – is modeled using both their individual "fractional ownership" and the communal "benefit derived from the co-production of high-quality articles".
• An editor's "creator/curator" orientation is quantitatively represented by a metric that assumes that "Creators are characterized by large-size edits [..]; curators’ edits are smaller".
• The "cooperative/competitive orientation" was quantified "based on [contributors'] role in the community (those closer to the community’s core are assumed to be more cooperative)." Based on previous research, editors were "organized in four strata, reflecting contributors’ commitment and involvement within the community: unregistered members, registered members, privileged members (holding a special privilege), and core members (i.e. administrators)." The authors theorize that "the greater one’s rights and responsibilities within the Wikipedia community, the more one is considered to have a cooperative orientation. Specifically, we assigned the values of 0.1, 0.4, 0.6, and 0.9 to the different strata (e.g., an administrator is assigned w1 = 0.1, reflecting the least competitive and most cooperative orientation)."
• Lastly, an editor's cost is quantified as the sum of
  • a. "the effort expended in producing content and editing an article", where the authors "assume that changing an existing sentence requires less effort than originating a new sentence, such that the effort expended by a contributor is a linear function the contributor’s position in the creator-curator continuum" (obviously a simplification, considering that an editor's individual contribution may well vary between adding and changing content).
  • b. "the effort associated with participation in coordination and administrative work, such as editing the articles’ Talk Pages". Again, the authors model this solely based on the editor's overall "cooperative/competitive orientation", reasoning that "This cost element is more applicable for the cooperative contributors".
  • c. "the effort of complying with Wikipedia’s rules and policies, in particular, neutrality-enforcing policies. This effort is intended to regulate only the self-interest activities (i.e., attempting to 'own' article portions) and thus is more applicable to competitive contributors." It is modeled as being proportional to the number of "owned" sentences, multiplied by the editor's competitiveness factor and a variable representing the community's overall "level of neutrality enforcement".

The game theoretic model consists of two levels:

A calculation of the model's Nash equilibrium (basically, a state where no individual "player" can improve their utility by making a unilateral change to their strategy) yields several rather complicated formulae (Theorems 1-4), from which the authors derive various overall conclusions, e.g. that

The authors explain that this means that

The second "key result" from the game-theoretic analysis is that

Based on this, the authors recommend that

See also previous coverage of related research by one of the authors (Ofer Arazy from the University of Haifa)

Other recent publications that could not be covered in time for this issue include the items listed below. Contributions, whether reviewing or summarizing newly published research, are always welcome.

From the abstract:

(We note with delight the mention of the Twitter feed associated with this research newsletter: "Serendipitous discoveries of relevant research were also made via the WikiResearch Twitter account @WikiResearch, the 'Wiki-research-l' mailing list and the Wikimedia Research biannual reports.")

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From the "Conclusions" section: