Making peripheral participation legitimate

Abstract

Open collaboration communities thrive when participation is plentiful. Recent research has shown that the English Wikipedia community has constructed a vast and accurate information resource primarily through the monumental effort of a relatively small number of active, volunteer editors. Beyond Wikipedia's active editor community is a substantially larger pool of potential participants: readers. In this paper we describe a set of field experiments using the Article Feedback Tool, a system designed to elicit lightweight contributions from Wikipedia's readers. Through the lens of social learning theory and comparisons to related work in open bug tracking software, we evaluate the costs and benefits of the expanded participation model and show both qualitatively and quantitatively that peripheral contributors add value to an open collaboration community as long as the cost of identifying low quality contributions remains low.

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