Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia

TLDR

Wikipedia’s success stems from many contributors improving accuracy, completeness, and clarity, yet adding editors is costly because coordination is required. The study investigates how the number of editors and their coordination methods influence article quality. The authors differentiate explicit coordination—planning through communication—from implicit coordination—where a subset of editors performs most of the work. Adding editors only improves quality when appropriate coordination is used; implicit coordination is more beneficial with many editors, explicit coordination is not, and both are more effective during formative stages, underscoring coordination’s critical role in harnessing the wisdom of crowds.

Abstract

Wikipedia's success is often attributed to the large numbers of contributors who improve the accuracy, completeness and clarity of articles while reducing bias. However, because of the coordination needed to write an article collaboratively, adding contributors is costly. We examined how the number of editors in Wikipedia and the coordination methods they use affect article quality. We distinguish between explicit coordination, in which editors plan the article through communication, and implicit coordination, in which a subset of editors structure the work by doing the majority of it. Adding more editors to an article improved article quality only when they used appropriate coordination techniques and was harmful when they did not. Implicit coordination through concentrating the work was more helpful when many editors contributed, but explicit coordination through communication was not. Both types of coordination improved quality more when an article was in a formative stage. These results demonstrate the critical importance of coordination in effectively harnessing the "wisdom of the crowd" in online production environments.