research-article

Mentoring in Wikipedia: a clash of cultures

Authors:

David R. Musicant,

Yuqing Ren,

James A. Johnson,

John RiedlAuthors Info & Claims

WikiSym '11: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

Pages 173 - 182

https://doi.org/10.1145/2038558.2038586

Published: 03 October 2011 Publication History

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Abstract

The continuous success of Wikipedia depends upon its capability to recruit and engage new editors, especially those with new knowledge and perspectives. Yet Wikipedia over the years has become a complicated bureaucracy that may be difficult for newcomers to navigate. Mentoring is a practice that has been widely used in offline organizations to help new members adjust to their roles. In this paper, we draw insights from the offline mentoring literature to analyze mentoring practices in Wikipedia and how they influence editor behaviors. Our quantitative analysis of the Adopt-a-user program shows mixed success of the program. Communication between adopters and adoptees is correlated with the amount of article editing done by adoptees shortly after adoption. Our qualitative analysis of the communication between adopters and adoptees suggests that several key functions of mentoring are missing or not fulfilled consistently. Most adopters focus on establishing their legitimacy rather than acting proactively to guide, protect, and support the long-term growth of adoptees. We conclude with recommendations of how Wikipedia mentoring programs can evolve to take advantage of offline best practices.

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Ren YZhang HKraut R(2023)How Did They Build the Free Encyclopedia? A Literature Review of Collaboration and Coordination among Wikipedia EditorsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/361736931:1(1-48)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617369
Warncke-Wang MHo RMiller MJohnson I(2023)Increasing Participation in Peer Production Communities with the Newcomer HomepageProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100717:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610071
Tan XZhou MZhang L(2023)Understanding Mentors’ Engagement in OSS Communities via Google Summer of CodeIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.324241549:5(3106-3130)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2023.3242415
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Index Terms

Mentoring in Wikipedia: a clash of cultures
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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Published In

WikiSym '11: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

October 2011

245 pages

ISBN:9781450309097

DOI:10.1145/2038558

Conference Chair:
Felipe Ortega
University Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
,
Program Chair:
Andrea Forte
Drexel University, Philadelphia

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGWEB: ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext, Hypermedia, and Web

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 03 October 2011

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Division of Information and Intelligent Systems

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WikiSym '11

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WikiSym '11: The 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

October 3 - 5, 2011

California, Mountain View

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Overall Acceptance Rate 69 of 145 submissions, 48%

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Ren YZhang HKraut R(2023)How Did They Build the Free Encyclopedia? A Literature Review of Collaboration and Coordination among Wikipedia EditorsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/361736931:1(1-48)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3617369
Warncke-Wang MHo RMiller MJohnson I(2023)Increasing Participation in Peer Production Communities with the Newcomer HomepageProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36100717:CSCW2(1-26)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610071
Tan XZhou MZhang L(2023)Understanding Mentors’ Engagement in OSS Communities via Google Summer of CodeIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2023.324241549:5(3106-3130)Online publication date: 1-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2023.3242415
Oh CLuo YSt. Jean BChoe E(2022)Patients Waiting for Cues: Information Asymmetries and Challenges in Sharing Patient-Generated Data in the ClinicProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35129546:CSCW1(1-23)Online publication date: 7-Apr-2022
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Botacin MMoreira FNavaux PGrégio AAlves M(2022) Terminator: A Secure Coprocessor to Accelerate Real-Time AntiViruses Using Inspection BreakpointsACM Transactions on Privacy and Security10.1145/349453525:2(1-34)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2022
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