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The Evolutionary Trajectories of Peer-Produced Artifacts: Group Composition, the Trajectories’ Exploration, and the Quality of Artifacts
- Source :
- MIS Quarterly. 44:2013-2053
- Publication Year :
- 2020
- Publisher :
- MIS Quarterly, 2020.
-
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.
- Subjects :
- Information Systems and Management
Digital artifact
Computer science
media_common.quotation_subject
05 social sciences
02 engineering and technology
Artifact (software development)
Space (commercial competition)
Online community
Peer production
Computer Science Applications
Management Information Systems
020204 information systems
0502 economics and business
0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering
Trajectory
050211 marketing
Quality (business)
Personal knowledge base
Information Systems
media_common
Cognitive psychology
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 21629730 and 02767783
- Volume :
- 44
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- MIS Quarterly
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi...........4f0a99c6018facbd78bae1d1acd2589a