The Evolutionary Trajectories of Peer-Produced Artifacts: Group Composition, the Trajectories’ Exploration, and the Quality of Artifacts

Abstract

Members of an online community peer-produce digital artifacts by negotiating different perspectives and personal knowledge bases. These negotiations are manifested in the temporal evolution of the peer-produced artifact. In this study, we conceptualize the evolution of a digital artifact as a trajectory in a feature space. Our theoretical frame suggests that, through negotiations, contributors’ actions “pull” the trajectory and shape its movement in the feature space. We hypothesize that the type of contributors that work on a focal article influences the extent to which that article’s trajectory explores alternative positions within that space, and that the trajectory’s exploration is, in turn, associated with the artifact’s quality. To test these hypotheses, we analyzed the trajectories of wiki articles drawn from two peer-production communities, Wikipedia and Wikia, tracking the evolution of 242 paired articles for over a decade during which the articles went through 536,745 revisions. We found that the contributors who are the most likely to increase the trajectory’s exploration are those that (1) return to work on the focal artifact and (2) are unregistered members in the broader online community. Further, our results show that the trajectory’s exploration has a curvilinear association with article quality, indicating that exploration contributes positively to quality, but that the effect is reversed when exploration exceeds a certain level. The insights derived from this study highlight the value of an artifact-centric approach to increasing our understanding of the dynamics underlying peer-production.

Generativity: A systematic review and conceptual framework

“…Finally, generative communities feature ongoing discourse between community members on the interpretation and use of a generative architecture (Arazy et al., 2020; Hoever et al., 2018; Ovrelid & Bygstad, 2019), or what have been described as the ‘generative relationships’ between the community members (Lane, 2011). Given that there is often a fluidity of membership in a heterogeneous community, this discourse often consists of knowledge validation (Brunswicker & Schecter, 2019), the setting of contextual conditions (Faraj et al., 2011) and sustaining narratives (Bartel & Garud, 2009).…”

Knowledge coordination via digital artefacts in highly dispersed teams

“…One notable exception is Levina (2005) who examined IS development team processes by looking at their digital artifacts; however, this study did not look specifically at knowledge coordination processes. As digital artifacts rely on knowledge inputs from members, they become the repository of the team's explicit and tacit knowledge (Arazy et al, 2020). Thus, digital artifacts, and the practices surrounding their production and reproduction, which we term as technology practices, play an essential role in coordinating knowledge across boundaries in virtual teams.…”

Measuring Wikipedia Article Quality in One Dimension by Extending ORES with Ordinal Regression

“…It essentially says that a Start-class article has one more unit quality of a Stub-class article, and that a C-class article has one more unit of quality than a Start-class article and so on. This approach is being adopted by other researchers including Arazy et al [4].…”

“…Although it is theoretically possible that using the MPQC might introduce statistical bias because it less accurate than ordinal quality scores for units of analysis other than the quality class and omits variation within quality classes, such threats to validity do not seem more significant than the threat introduced by inaccurate predictions. If the MPQC does not provide sufficient granularity and a continuous measure is desired as in Halfaker [16] or Arazy et al [4], I recommend using a measure based on ordinal regression as described in §5.1.2.…”