Strong regularities in online peer production Export

@inproceedings{citeulike:3145429, abstract = {Online peer production systems have enabled people to coactively create, share, classify, and rate content on an unprecedented scale. This paper describes strong macroscopic regularities in how people contribute to peer production systems, and shows how these regularities arise from simple dynamical rules. First, it is demonstrated that the probability a person stops contributing varies inversely with the number of contributions he has made. This rule leads to a power law distribution for the number of contributions per person in which a small number of very active users make most of the contributions. The rule also implies that the power law exponent is proportional to the effort required to contribute, as justified by the data. Second, the level of activity per topic is shown to follow a lognormal distribution generated by a stochastic reinforcement mechanism. A small number of very popular topics thus accumulate the vast majority of contributions. These trends are demonstrated to hold across hundreds of millions of contributions to four disparate peer production systems of differing scope, interface style, and purpose.}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Wilkinson, Dennis M.}, booktitle = {EC '08: Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce}, citeulike-article-id = {3145429}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1386790.1386837}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1386790.1386837}, doi = {10.1145/1386790.1386837}, isbn = {9781605581699}, keywords = {bugzilla, delicious, digg, distribution, diversity, lognormal, powerlaws, socialweb, statistical, wikipedia, wilkinson}, location = {Chicago, Il, USA}, pages = {302--309}, posted-at = {2009-06-18 19:26:57}, priority = {2}, publisher = {ACM}, title = {Strong regularities in online peer production}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1386790.1386837}, year = {2008} }

TY - CONF ID - citeulike:3145429 L3 - citeulike-article-id:3145429 N2 - Online peer production systems have enabled people to coactively create, share, classify, and rate content on an unprecedented scale. This paper describes strong macroscopic regularities in how people contribute to peer production systems, and shows how these regularities arise from simple dynamical rules. First, it is demonstrated that the probability a person stops contributing varies inversely with the number of contributions he has made. This rule leads to a power law distribution for the number of contributions per person in which a small number of very active users make most of the contributions. The rule also implies that the power law exponent is proportional to the effort required to contribute, as justified by the data. Second, the level of activity per topic is shown to follow a lognormal distribution generated by a stochastic reinforcement mechanism. A small number of very popular topics thus accumulate the vast majority of contributions. These trends are demonstrated to hold across hundreds of millions of contributions to four disparate peer production systems of differing scope, interface style, and purpose. CY - Chicago, Il, USA SN - 9781605581699 AD - New York, NY, USA EP - 309 TI - Strong regularities in online peer production PB - ACM T2 - EC '08: Proceedings of the 9th ACM conference on Electronic commerce SP - 302 KW - bugzilla KW - delicious KW - digg KW - distribution KW - diversity KW - lognormal KW - powerlaws KW - socialweb KW - statistical KW - wikipedia KW - wilkinson AU - Wilkinson, Dennis PY - 2008/// UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1386790.1386837 ER -