Collaborative Writing Processes

Collaborative Writing Processes and their Impact on User Behaviour in Online Communities

Affiliation: TU Darmstadt

Associated since: Dezember 2016

CEDIFOR Project Partners

CEDIFOR-Partners:

  • Ofer Arazy, PhD, Department of Information Science, University of Haifa

Short Description

Research in this project is concerned with collaborative writing processes and their impact on online communities. We detected user groups, which vary in their motivation to participate and which, in their constituency, are crucial for the success of an online community. Results were based on the changelog of several thousand Wikipedia articles. These changes were then analyzed automatically and used to cluster user profiles. In a following step, the user profiles were correlated with further factors and examined over a span of several years. We could illuminate novel possibilities to coordinate contributions in online communities that are based on (partly implicit) user preferences.

Project Results

We were able to extend our system for the analysis of edit histories in the popular FANDOM Wiki platform. In particular, our results show that certain patterns of collaborations are more beneficial than others, see details in Arnold et al. (2017).

Publications:

  • Arnold, T., Daxenberger, J., Gurevych, I., & Weihe, K. (2017). Is Interaction More Important Than Individual Performance? A Study of Motifs in Wikia. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference Companion on World Wide Web, 1609-1617.
  • Arazy, O., Lifshitz-Assaf, H., Nov, O., Daxenberger, J., Balestra, M., & Cheshire, C. (2017). On the “How” and “Why” of Emergent Role Behaviors in Wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 20th Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2017), 2039-2051.
  • Arazy, O., Daxenberger, J., Lifshitz-Assaf, H., Nov, O., & Gurevych, I. (2017). Turbulent Stability of Emergent Roles: The Dualistic Nature of Self-Organizing Knowledge Co-Production. Information Systems Research, 792-812.