The Success and Failure of Quality Improvement Projects in Peer Production Communities

Abstract

Peer production communities have been proven to be successful at creating valuable artefacts, with Wikipedia as a prime example. However, a number of studies have shown that work in these communities tends to be of uneven quality and certain content areas receive more attention than others. In this paper, we examine the efficacy of a range of targeted strategies to increase the quality of under-attended content areas in peer production communities. Mining data from five quality improvement projects in the English Wikipedia, the largest peer production community in the world, we show that certain types of strategies (e.g. creating artefacts from scratch) have better quality outcomes than others (e.g. improving existing artefacts), even if both are done by a similar cohort of participants. We discuss the implications of our findings for Wikipedia as well as other peer production communities.