The Evolution of Wikipedia’s Norm Network

Constraints on cooperation shape hierarchical versus distributed structure in human groups

Some human groups are organized hierarchically and some are distributed. Both types of groups occur in economic, political, and military domains, but it is unclear why hierarchical organizations are favored in certain contexts and distributed organizations are favored in others. I propose that these different organizational structures can be explained by human groups having different constraints on their ability to foster cooperation within the group. Human within-group cooperation is often maintained by monitoring and punishment. In hierarchical groups, monitoring and punishment are organized into tree-like command-and-control structures with supervisors responsible for monitoring the cooperation of their subordinates and punishing non-cooperators. By contrast, in distributed groups, monitoring is diffuse and punishment is collective. I propose that the organization of cooperative human groups is constrained by the costs of monitoring and punishment. I formalize this hypothesis with a model where individuals in a group cooperate to produce public goods while embedded in a network of monitoring and punishment responsibilities. I show that, when punishment costs are high and monitoring costs are low, socially-optimal monitoring and punishment networks are distributed. The size of these distributed networks is constrained by monitoring costs. However, when punishment costs are low, socially-optimal networks are hierarchical. Monitoring costs do not constrain the size of hierarchical networks but determine how many levels of supervision are required to foster cooperation in the hierarchical group. These results may explain the increasingly large and hierarchical groups throughout much of human history. They also suggest that the recent emergence of large-scale distributed organizations has been possible because new technologies, like the internet, have made monitoring costs extremely low.

Community Vital Signs: Measuring Wikipedia Communities’ Sustainable Growth and Renewal

Wikipedia is an undeniably successful project, with unprecedented numbers of online volunteer contributors. After 2007, researchers started to observe that the number of active editors for the largest Wikipedias declined after rapid initial growth. Years after those announcements, researchers and community activists still need to understand how to measure community health. In this paper, we study patterns of growth, decline and stagnation, and we propose the creation of 6 sets of language-independent indicators that we call “Vital Signs”. Three focus on the general population of active editors creating content: retention, stability, and balance; the other three are related to specific community functions: specialists, administrators, and global community participation. We borrow the analogy from the medical field, as these indicators represent a first step in defining the health status of a community; they can constitute a valuable reference point to foresee and prevent future risks. We present our analysis for eight Wikipedia language editions, and we show that communities are renewing their productive force even with stagnating absolute numbers; we observe a general lack of renewal in positions related to special functions or administratorship. Finally, we evaluate our framework by discussing these indicators with Wikimedia affiliates to support them in promoting the necessary changes to grow the communities.

Early onset of structural inequality in the formation of collaborative knowledge in all Wikimedia projects

The Wikimedia project, including Wikipedia, is one of the largest communal data sets and has served as a representative medium to convey collective knowledge in the twenty-first century. Researchers have believed that the analysis of these collaborative digital data sets provides a unique window into the processes of collaborative knowledge formation; yet, in reality, most previous studies have usually focused on its narrow subsets. Here, by analysing all 863 Wikimedia projects (various types and in different languages), we find evidence for a universal growth pattern in communal data formation. We observe that inequality arises early in the development of Wikimedia projects and stabilizes at high levels. To understand the mechanism behind the observed structural inequality, we develop an agent-based model that considers the characteristics of the editors and successfully reproduces the empirical results. Our findings from the Wikimedia projects data, along with other types of collaboration data, such as patents and academic papers, show that a small number of editors have a disproportionately large influence on the formation of collective knowledge. This analysis offers insights into how various collaboration environments can be sustained in the future.

How the medium shapes the message: Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences

Communication technologies, from printing to social media, affect our historical records by changing the way ideas are spread and recorded. Yet, finding statistical evidence of this fact has been challenging. Here we combine a common causal inference technique (instrumental variable estimation) with a dataset on nearly forty thousand biographies from Wikipedia (Pantheon 2.0), to study the effect of the introduction of printing in European cities on Wikipedia’s digital biographical records. By using a city’s distance to Mainz as an instrument for the adoption of the movable type press, we show that European cities that adopted printing earlier were more likely to become the birthplace of a famous scientist or artist during the years following the invention of printing. We bring these findings to recent communication technologies by showing that the number of radios and televisions in a country correlates with the number of globally famous performing artists and sports players born in that country, even after controlling for GDP, population, and including country and year fixed effects. These findings support the hypothesis that the introduction of communication technologies can bias historical records in the direction of the content that is best suited for each technology.

The Emergence of Social Norms and Conventions

The utility of our actions frequently depends upon the beliefs and behavior of other agents. Thankfully, through experience, we learn norms and conventions that provide stable expectations for navigating our social world. Here, we review several distinct influences on their content and distribution. At the level of individuals locally interacting in dyads, success depends on rapidly adapting pre-existing norms to the local context. Hence, norms are shaped by complex cognitive processes involved in learning and social reasoning. At the population level, norms are influenced by intergenerational transmission and the structure of the social network. As human social connectivity continues to increase, understanding and predicting how these levels and time scales interact to produce new norms will be crucial for improving communities.

The emergence of consensus: a primer

The origin of population-scale coordination has puzzled philosophers and scientists for centuries. Recently, game theory, evolutionary approaches and complex systems science have provided quantitative insights on the mechanisms of social consensus. However, the literature is vast and widely scattered across fields, making it hard for the single researcher to navigate it. This short review aims to provide a compact overview of the main dimensions over which the debate has unfolded and to discuss some representative examples. It focuses on those situations in which consensus emerges 'spontaneously' in the absence of centralized institutions and covers topics that include the macroscopic consequences of the different microscopic rules of behavioural contagion, the role of social networks and the mechanisms that prevent the formation of a consensus or alter it after it has emerged. Special attention is devoted to the recent wave of experiments on the emergence of consensus in social systems.

Robust clustering of languages across Wikipedia growth

Wikipedia is the largest existing knowledge repository that is growing on a genuine crowdsourcing support. While the English Wikipedia is the most extensive and the most researched one with over 5 million articles, comparatively little is known about the behaviour and growth of the remaining 283 smaller Wikipedias, the smallest of which, Afar, has only one article. Here, we use a subset of these data, consisting of 14 962 different articles, each of which exists in 26 different languages, from Arabic to Ukrainian. We study the growth of Wikipedias in these languages over a time span of 15 years. We show that, while an average article follows a random path from one language to another, there exist six well-defined clusters of Wikipedias that share common growth patterns. The make-up of these clusters is remarkably robust against the method used for their determination, as we verify via four different clustering methods. Interestingly, the identified Wikipedia clusters have little correlation with language families and groups. Rather, the growth of Wikipedia across different languages is governed by different factors, ranging from similarities in culture to information literacy.

Evolution of Wikipedia's medical content: past, present and future

As one of the most commonly read online sources of medical information, Wikipedia is an influential public health platform. Its medical content, community, collaborations and challenges have been evolving since its creation in 2001, and engagement by the medical community is vital for ensuring its accuracy and completeness. Both the encyclopaedia’s internal metrics as well as external assessments of its quality indicate that its articles are highly variable, but improving. Although content can be edited by anyone, medical articles are primarily written by a core group of medical professionals. Diverse collaborative ventures have enhanced medical article quality and reach, and opportunities for partnerships are more available than ever. Nevertheless, Wikipedia’s medical content and community still face significant challenges, and a socioecological model is used to structure specific recommendations. We propose that the medical community should prioritise the accuracy of biomedical information in the world’s most consulted encyclopaedia.

Collister L, Pikas CK, Crick T, Masuzzo P, Caravaggi A, Berg DR, Niemeyer KE, Ross-Hellauer T, Mannheimer S, Rigling L, Katz DS, Greshake Tzovaras B, Pacheco-Mendoza J, Fatima N, Poblet M, Isaakidis M, Irawan DE, Renaut S, Madan CR, Matthias L, Nørgaard Kjær J, O'Donnell DP, Neylon C, Kearns S, Selvaraju M, Colomb J. A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments.

Collister L, Pikas CK, Crick T, Masuzzo P, Caravaggi A, Berg DR, Niemeyer KE, Ross-Hellauer T, Mannheimer S, Rigling L, Katz DS, Greshake Tzovaras B, Pacheco-Mendoza J, Fatima N, Poblet M, Isaakidis M, Irawan DE, Renaut S, Madan CR, Matthias L, Nørgaard Kjær J, O'Donnell DP, Neylon C, Kearns S, Selvaraju M, Colomb J. A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of Web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform current models while avoiding as many of the biases of existing systems as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that, at least partially, resolves many of the technical and social issues associated with peer review, and can potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments.

Collister L, Pikas CK, Crick T, Masuzzo P, Caravaggi A, Berg DR, Niemeyer KE, Ross-Hellauer T, Mannheimer S, Rigling L, Katz DS, Greshake Tzovaras B, Pacheco-Mendoza J, Fatima N, Poblet M, Isaakidis M, Irawan DE, Renaut S, Madan CR, Matthias L, Nørgaard Kjær J, O'Donnell DP, Neylon C, Kearns S, Selvaraju M, Colomb J. A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments.