February report of few papers about Wikipedia at CSCW conference by David Karger at Haystack Blog, MIT CSAIL Research.
The paper briefly reviewed are
* Socialization Tactics in Wikipedia and their Effects, by Choi, Alexander, Kraut and Levine: studied how participants early experiences of Wikipedia—whether they were invited or began editing on their own; whether their work was ignored, admired, or critiqued; what kind of advice they received—affected users later participation in and contributions to Wikipedia.
* The work of sustaining order in Wikipedia: The banning of a vandal by Geiger and Ribes
* Readers are Not Free-Riders: Reading as a Form of Participation on Wikipedia, by Antin and Cheshire: the more you know about wikipedia (sampled with a survey), the more you participate
* Egalitarians at the Gate: One-Sided Gatekeeping Practices in Participatory Social Media, by Keegan and Gergle: which breaking news stories are featured on the front page? They studied whether this decision is made in an egalitarian fashion or whether some individuals have significantly more power. Most interestingly, they found that certain ‘elite users’ who participate in the discussion to an unusually high degree do have inordinate power to “spike” stories, preventing them from appearing, but do not seem to have power to push stories they like into appearance.
* Beyond Wikipedia: Coordination and Conflict in Online Production Groups by Kittur and Kraut. Interestingly they studied Wikia.com, a service hosting over 6000 distinct wikis all running on the same Mediawiki platform as Wikipedia. The uniformity of implementation meant that it could be ruled out as a source of different behaviors in different wikis.