Beyond notification: Filling gaps in peer production projects

Ford, Heather and Pensa, Iolanda and Devouard, Florence and Pucciarelli, Marta and Botturi, Luca (2018) Beyond notification: Filling gaps in peer production projects. New Media & Society. ISSN 1461-4448

Text (Authors’ preprint. Accepted for publication in New Media & Society journal on 2 February 2018. Please consult journal edition when citing.) wp_primary_school_paper_acceptedv.pdf - Submitted Version Download (539kB)

Abstract

In order to counter systemic bias in peer production projects like Wikipedia, a variety of strategies have been used to fill gaps and improve the completeness of the archive. We test a number of these strategies in a project aimed at improving articles relating to South Africa’s primary school curriculum and find that many of the predominant strategies are insufficient for filling Wikipedia’s gaps. Notifications that alert users to the existence of gaps including incomplete or missing articles, in particular, are found to be ineffective at improving articles. Only through the process of trust-building and the development of negotiated boundary objects, potential allies (institutional academics in this case) can be enrolled in the task of editing the encyclopaedia. Rather than a simple process of enrolment via notification, this project demonstrated the principles of negotiation required for engaging with new editor groups in the long-term project of filling Wikipedia’s gaps

Item Type:	Scientific journal article, Newspaper article or Magazine article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Boundary objects, expertise, participation, systemic bias, Wikipedia
Subjects:	Computer sciences > Information systems Computer sciences > Information systems > Data management Eastern, Asiatic, African, American and Australasian languages, literature and related subjects > African studies Education > Academic studies in education
Department/unit:	Dipartimento ambiente costruzioni e design > Istituto design
Depositing User:	Iolanda Pensa
Date Deposited:	28 Mar 2018 05:30
Last Modified:	27 Sep 2021 17:00
URI:	http://repository.supsi.ch/id/eprint/9444

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