ABSTRACT

Participants in open collaboration communities coproduce knowledge despite minimal explicit communication to coordinate the efforts. Studying how participants coordinate around the knowledge artifact and its impacts are critical for understanding the open knowledge production model. This study builds on the theory of stigmergy, wherein actions performed by a participant leave traces on a knowledge artifact and stimulate succeeding actions. We find that stigmergy involves two intertwined processes: collective modification and collective excitation. We propose a new measure of stigmergy based on the spatial and temporal clustering of contributions. By analyzing thousands of Wikipedia articles, we find that the degree of stigmergy is positively associated with community members’ participation and the quality of the knowledge produced. This study contributes to the understanding of open collaboration by characterizing the spatial-temporal clustering of contributions and providing new insights into the relationship between stigmergy and knowledge production outcomes. These findings can help practitioners increase user engagement in knowledge production processes in order to create more sustainable open collaboration communities.

摘要

尽管协调工作的明确沟通很少，但开放协作社区的参与者共同创造知识。研究参与者如何围绕知识工件及其影响进行协调对于理解开放知识生产模型至关重要。这项研究建立在耻辱理论的基础上，其中参与者执行的操作会在知识工件上留下痕迹并刺激后续的操作。我们发现耻辱涉及两个相互交织的过程：集体修改和集体激发。我们提出了一种基于贡献的空间和时间聚类的新的耻辱度量。通过分析数千篇维基百科文章，我们发现耻辱程度与社区成员的参与和所产生的知识的质量呈正相关。这项研究通过描述贡献的时空聚类特征并为污蔑与知识生产结果之间的关系提供新的见解，有助于理解开放合作。这些发现可以帮助从业者提高用户对知识生产过程的参与度，以创建更可持续的开放协作社区。