Coordinating tasks on the commons

Abstract

How is work created, assigned, and completed on large-scale, crowd-powered systems like Wikipedia? And what design principles might enable these federated online systems to be more effective? This paper reports on a qualitative study of work and task practices on Wikipedia. Despite the availability of tag-based community-wide task assignment mechanisms, informants reported that self-directed goals, within-topic expertise, and fortuitous discovery are more frequently used than community-tagged tasks. We examine how Wikipedia editors organize their actions and the actions of other participants, and what implications this has for understanding, and building tools for, crowd-powered systems, or any web site where the main