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Strong regularities in online peer production (2008)
| Venue: | In Proc. of the 9th ACM conf. on Electronic commerce, EC ’08 |
| Citations: | 55 - 2 self |
BibTeX
@INPROCEEDINGS{Wilkinson08strongregularities,
author = {Dennis M. Wilkinson},
title = {Strong regularities in online peer production},
booktitle = {In Proc. of the 9th ACM conf. on Electronic commerce, EC ’08},
year = {2008},
pages = {302--309},
publisher = {ACM}
}
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Abstract
Online peer production systems have enabled people to coactively create, share, classify, and rate content on an unprecedented scale. This paper describes strong macroscopic regularities in how people contribute to peer production systems, and shows how these regu-larities arise from simple dynamical rules. First, it is demonstrated that the probability a person stops contributing varies inversely with the number of contributions he has made. This rule leads to a power law distribution for the number of contributions per person in which a small number of very active users make most of the contributions. The rule also implies that the power law exponent is proportional to the effort required to contribute, as justified by the data. Second, the level of activity per topic is shown to follow a lognormal distribu-tion generated by a stochastic reinforcement mechanism. A small number of very popular topics thus accumulate the vast majority of contributions. These trends are demonstrated to hold across hun-dreds of millions of contributions to four disparate peer production systems of differing scope, interface style, and purpose. 1.
Keyphrases
online peer production strong regularity small number rate content power law exponent popular topic unprecedented scale interface style simple dynamical rule lognormal distribu-tion stochastic reinforcement mechanism active user production system strong macroscopic regularity vast majority power law distribution online peer production system disparate peer production system
