"The authors had already used this data in some publications which we covered here back in 2013 ("What drives people to contribute to Wikipedia? Experiment suggests reciprocity and social image motivations"). In the new paper, they also look these 730 editors' contributions over the period from 2011 to 2020, specifically

- Quantity of contributions (using both edit counts and number of bytes added)
- Quality of contributions, measured using content persistence (i.e. whether or not other editors later removed the contributed content)
- "Interpersonal cooperation", measured by how likely editors are to delete (i.e., “revert”) the contributions of others without providing an explanation [...] Wikipedia contributors typically consider non justified reverts as highly uncooperative and harmful to the project.

Among other results, the authors

uncovered a surprising negative correlation between our measures of contribution quantity and quality at the editor level. Namely, the social signalers in our data, if they contribute significantly more content to Wikipedia, also contribute lower quality material on average. In practice, this means that, as vetted by their peers, social signalers contribute content that persists about 38% less revisions on average"

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2024/December

#Wikipedia #DigitalCommons #OnlineCollaboration