Exploring underproduction in Wikipedia

Abstract

Researchers have used Wikipedia data to identify a wide range of antecedents to success in collective production. But we have not yet inquired whether collective production creates those public goods which bring most value-add from a social perspective. In this poster I explore two key circumstances in which collective production can fail to respond to social need: when goods fail to attain high quality despite (1) high demand or (2) explicit designation by producers as highly important. In the context of Wikipedia. I propose first to examine articles that remain low quality, or underproduced, despite the fact they are viewed often; and second, to examine articles that remain low quality despite the fact that they were identified as important by Wikipedia contributors. This research highlights the fact that collective production needs to be examined not only by itself but also in the context of a market for goods in order to ascertain the benefits of this production form. The final version of this study will integrate data on underproduced articles with data on knowledge categories to uncover systematic patterns of underproduction at the category level and predict which categories are most in need of quality improvement. Additionally I will use in-depth qualitative methods to examine the mechanisms through which underproduction occurs in select knowledge categories to distill practical recommendations for collective production improvement.

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