Abstract
Online peer production projects, such as Wikipedia and open-source software, have become important producers of cultural and technological goods. While much research has been done on the way that large existing projects work, little is known about how projects get started or who starts them. Nor is it clear how much influence founders have on the future trajectory of a community. We measure the behavior and social networks of 60,959 users on Wikia.com over a two month period. We compare the activity, local network positions, and global network positions of future founders and non-founders. We then explore the relationship between these measures and the relative growth of a founder’s wikis. We suggest hypotheses for future research based on this exploratory analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
Similar analyses, (e.g., [21]) connect all editors, but a cutoff more closely approximates the social interactions we are interested in.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Army Research Office (W911NF-14-10686) and the NSF (IIS-1617468, IIS-1617129). The authors also wish to thank the iConference reviewers for their very helpful comments.
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Foote, J., Contractor, N. (2018). The Behavior and Network Position of Peer Production Founders. In: Chowdhury, G., McLeod, J., Gillet, V., Willett, P. (eds) Transforming Digital Worlds. iConference 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10766. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78105-1_12
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