Research Note‹Content and Collaboration: An Affiliation Network Approach to Information Quality in Online Peer Production Communities

Author List: Kane, Gerald C.; Ransbotham, Sam;
Information Systems Research, 2016, Volume 27, Issue 2, Page 424-439.
The 15-year history of collaboration on Wikipedia offers insight into how peer production communities create knowledge. In this research, we combine disparate content and collaboration approaches through a social network analysis approach known as an affiliation network. It captures both how knowledge is transferred in a peer production network and also the underlying skills possessed by its contributors in a single methodological approach. We test this approach on the Wikipedia articles dedicated to medical information developed in a subcommunity known as a WikiProject. Overall, we find that the position of an article in the affiliation network is associated with the quality of the article. We further investigate information quality through additional qualitative and quantitative approaches including expert coders using medical students, crowdsourcing using Amazon Mechanical Turk, and visualization using network graphs. A review by fourth-year medical students indicates that the Wikipedia quality rating is a reliable measure of information quality. Amazon Mechanical Turk ratings, however, are a less reliable measure of information quality, reflecting observable content characteristics such as article length and the number of references.
Keywords: social media ; information quality ; network analysis
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#190 0.193 new licensing license open comparison type affiliation perpetual prior address peer question greater compared explore competing crowdsourcing provide choice place
#289 0.186 qualitative methods quantitative approaches approach selection analysis criteria used mixed methodological aspects recent selecting combining known conclusions included article appropriateness
#45 0.180 community communities online members participants wikipedia social member knowledge content discussion collaboration attachment communication law virtual membership structures forms activities
#249 0.101 network networks social analysis ties structure p2p exchange externalities individual impact peer-to-peer structural growth centrality participants sharing economic ownership embeddedness
#115 0.091 quality different servqual service high-quality difference used quantity importance use measure framework impact assurance better include means van dimensions assessing
#276 0.050 satisfaction information systems study characteristics data results using user related field survey empirical quality hypotheses important success various indicate tested