File:Halfaker13making-preprint.pdf

Making Peripheral Participation Legitimate: Reader Engagement Experiments in Wikipedia

Aaron Halfaker, Oliver Keyes, Dario Taraborelli

ABSTRACT Open collaboration communities thrive when participation isplentiful. Recent research has shown that the English Wik-ipedia community has constructed a vast and accurate infor-mation resource primarily through the monumental effort of arelatively small number of active, volunteer editors. BeyondWikipedia’s active editor community is a substantially largerpool of potential participants: readers. In this paper we de-scribe a set of field experiments using the Article FeedbackTool, a system designed to elicit lightweight contributionsfrom Wikipedia’s readers. Through the lens of social learningtheory and comparisons to related work in open bug trackingsoftware, we evaluate the costs and benefits of the expandedparticipation model and show both qualitatively and quanti-tatively that peripheral contributors add value to an open col-laboration community as long as the cost of identifying lowquality contributions remains low.

• http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~halfak/publications/Making_Peripheral_Participation_Legitimate/halfaker13making-preprint.pdf

Keywords: Article Feedback Tool, AFT5, WMF failed software extensions, Flow, Vector skin, Echo, VisualEditor, Flow, Media Viewer, Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation