Abstract:
This project intends to evaluate the Wikipedia Education Program: https://wikiedu.org/
Attracting and retaining newcomers is critical and challenging for online production communities such asWikipedia, both because volunteers need specialized training and are likely to leave before being integratedinto the community. In response to these challenges, the Wikimedia Foundation started the Wiki Education Project (Wiki Ed), an online program in which college students edit Wikipedia articles as class assignments. The Wiki Ed program incorporates many components of institutional socialization, a process many conventional organizations successfully use to integrate new employees through formalized on-boarding practices. Researchhas not adequately investigated whether Wiki Ed and similar programs are effective ways to integrate volunteers in online communities, and, if so, the mechanisms involved. This paper evaluates the Wiki Edprogram by comparing 16,819 student editors in 770 Wiki Ed classes with new editors who joined Wikipediain the conventional way. The evaluation shows that the Wiki Ed students did more work, improved articlesmore, and were more committed to Wikipedia. For example, compared to new editors who joined Wikipediain the conventional way they were twice as likely to still be editing Wikipedia a year after their Wiki Ed classwas finished. Further, students in classrooms that encouraged joint activity, a key component of institutional socialization, produced better quality work than those in classrooms where students worked independently.These findings are consistent with an interpretation that the Wiki Ed program was successful because itincorporated elements of institutionalized socialization.
This paper is published at CSCW2020:
Ang Li, Zheng Yao, Diyi Yang, Chinmay Kulkarni, Rosta Farzan, and Robert E. Kraut. 2020. Successful Online Socialization: Lessons from the Wikipedia Education Program. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW1, Article 050 (May 2020), 24 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3392857
CSCW online presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ua5acwGVnRU