Abstract
To investigate how participants in peer production systems allocate their time, we examine editing activity on Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia. To analyze the huge edit histories of the site’s administrators we introduce a visualization technique, the chromogram, that can display very long textual sequences through a simple color coding scheme. Using chromograms we describe a set of characteristic editing patterns. In addition to confirming known patterns, such reacting to vandalism events, we identify a distinct class of organized systematic activities. We discuss how both reactive and systematic strategies shed light on self-allocation of effort in Wikipedia, and how they may pertain to other peer-production systems.
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Wattenberg, M., Viégas, F.B., Hollenbach, K. (2007). Visualizing Activity on Wikipedia with Chromograms. In: Baranauskas, C., Palanque, P., Abascal, J., Barbosa, S.D.J. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction – INTERACT 2007. INTERACT 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4663. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74800-7_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74800-7_23
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