Project talk: Coordination Work and Group Membership in WikiProjects

This presentation is part of the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 program.

Jonathan T. Morgan, Michael Gilbert, David McDonald, Mark Zachry

WikiProjects have contributed to Wikipedia’s success in important ways, yet the range of work that WikiProjects perform and the way they coordinate that work remains largely unexplored. In this study, we perform a content analysis of 788 work-related discussions from the talk pag-es of 138 WikiProjects in order to understand the role Wik-iProjects play in collaborative work on Wikipedia. We find that the editors use WikiProjects to coordinate a wide varie-ty of activities beyond content production and that non-members play a larger role in WikiProjects than previously thought. Our research suggests that WikiProject collabora-tion is more open and less structured than that of many vir-tual teams and projects function more like FLOSS projects than traditional groups.

A PDF file will be made available on August 5, 2013, through the WikiSym + OpenSym 2013 conference proceedings.

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