Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia

TLDR

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has attracted attention both because of its popularity and its unconventional policy of letting anyone on the Internet edit its articles. This paper presents an empirical analysis of Wikipedia and examines how its community has evolved with growth. The authors conduct an empirical analysis, compare results to a prior study, and focus on “Talk” pages that coordinate work. The community demonstrates resilience to malicious edits, rapid growth in coordination and organization, and “Talk” pages facilitate strategic planning, guideline enforcement, and emphasize group coordination, policy, and process.

Abstract

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, has attracted attention both because of its popularity and its unconventional policy of letting anyone on the Internet edit its articles. This paper describes the results of an empirical analysis of Wikipedia and discusses ways in which the Wikipedia community has evolved as it has grown. We contrast our findings with an earlier study and present three main results. First, the community maintains a strong resilience to malicious editing, despite tremendous growth and high traffic. Second, the fastest growing areas of Wikipedia are devoted to coordination and organization. Finally, we focus on a particular set of pages used to coordinate work, the "Talk" pages. By manually coding the content of a subset of these pages, we find that these pages serve many purposes, notably supporting strategic planning of edits and enforcement of standard guidelines and conventions. Our results suggest that despite the potential for anarchy, the Wikipedia community places a strong emphasis on group coordination, policy, and process