Online Communities, Teams Characteristics, and Knowledge Quality
Understanding the characteristics of a “good” team and members diversity affects the outcomes group in a question of growing importance for the organizations, for their competitive advantage relies more and more on innovation, produced by virtual cooperat
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Abstract. Understanding the characteristics of a “good” team and members diversity affects the outcomes group in a question of growing importance for the organizations, for their competitive advantage relies more and more on innovation, produced by virtual cooperation on knowledge production. In this study, we propose a method to forecast the future quality of an online knowledge production community -or online epistemic community- by studying the composition of the group who initiated them (the “core members” of, in this case, an article). First, we set a team building period which is defined as the period of 120 days after article creation in order to construct this “core members” group. Second, we explore the effects on article quality of both group and member diversity. Core members’ characteristics are learned from their previous behavior. The analysis is based on the French Wikipedia project. Our results show that the most important attributes of initial core member to have a high quality article are average reputation, diversity’s contribution, participation, and group size. We also find no significant effects of experience diversity and reputation during the team building period. Keywords: Wikipedia Epistemic community Article quality Characteristics of the team Core member Group composition Diversity
1 Introduction Online epistemic communities or community of creation, aim at creating new knowledge [1, 2]. The two well known examples of these communities are open source software projects and Wikipedia, the largest free and open access online encyclopedia. These communities, as an online self organizing group, perform a large number of activities such developing softwares and editing Wikipedia articles, but also prioritize the work of the participants (via bug lists or articles in need of improvement), or manage the global organization of the project. This organizational model of online epistemic community, is the core of new and innovative knowledge generation. In the same time, the way of community success is uncertain and risky. Like business building, most attempts fail, do not matter the manner in which dollars were spent. The question of how to integrate newcomers, but also what a good (efficient and effective) team means are intensively discussed in the recent literature. Many crucial factors, at various stages of the group composition, are stressed: motivation of participants [3], governance structure [8], culture and ideology [4], social structure and © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2016 Published by Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. All Rights Reserved H. Afsarmanesh et al. (Eds.): PRO-VE 2016, IFIP AICT 480, pp. 35–47, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-45390-3_4
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A. Rezgui and N. Jullien
network ties [6, 7] and social identity [8, 9]. In general, these studies highlight the reasons individuals participate in online communities and the manner in which these members are organized to reach group target. In particular they interested on the proc
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