Abstract:
In any collaborative system, people do not contribute equally. This
is particularly observed to be true for systems seeking to gather
contributions from a large, diverse group of people. In such settings,
it is seen that a sizable amount of contribution comes from a small
group of highly-active users. While it is well-understood that such
users are instrumental in the system’s progress, the contribution
made by a large group of less-active users is not sufficiently understood. Popularly called masses, these users comprise of the majority
of the system’s user base. It is, therefore, important to examine their
worth in the system. The literature in this direction points towards
two contradicting points of view with one acknowledging masses’
contribution (Ortega Hypothesis) while the other deeming them unnecessary in the system (Newton Hypothesis). Given the large-scale
collaboration facilitated by Wikipedia where a large crowd with
a diverse skill-set and hence unequal contribution participates, a
detailed investigation of the worth of masses becomes necessary
for informed policy-making.
In this work, we examine whether masses help or hamper the
knowledge-building in Wikipedia. We specifically consider their
contribution across different contribution types pertaining to the
insertion of new content as well as the administrative activities.
We observe that although the individual contribution by masses
is small, yet they contribute important pieces of knowledge to
Wikipedia articles. The results indicate that the overall contribution
of masses across several parameters even exceeds the contribution
by elites. We also find that as compared to masses, highly-active
users dominate the edits where no new content is inserted and only
activities involving the up-keeping of the existing content such as
restructuring or formatting take place. The results of the study may
help in devising appropriate incentivization policies for Wikipedia
and the collaborative systems in general.
