Information Seeding and Knowledge Production in Online Communities: Evidence from OpenStreetMap
| Autor: | Abhishek Nagaraj |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2021 |
| Předmět: |
Natural experiment
business.industry Computer science media_common.quotation_subject Strategy and Management 05 social sciences Management Science and Operations Research Crowdsourcing Peer production Data science Crowding out Knowledge production 0502 economics and business Quality (business) Seeding 050207 economics Baseline (configuration management) Empirical evidence business 050203 business & management media_common Open innovation |
| Zdroj: | Management Science. 67:4908-4934 |
| ISSN: | 1526-5501 0025-1909 |
| DOI: | 10.1287/mnsc.2020.3764 |
| Popis: | The wild success of a few online community-produced knowledge goods, notably Wikipedia, has obscured the fact that most attempts at forming online communities fail. A large body of work analyses motivations behind user contributions to successful, online communities but less is known, however, about early-stage interventions that might make online communities more or less successful. This study evaluates information seeding, a popular practice to bootstrap online communities by enabling contributors to build on externally-sourced information rather that starting from scratch. I analyze the effects of information seeding on follow-on contributions using data from more than 350 million contributions made by over 577,000 contributors to OpenStreetMap, a Wikipedia-style digital map-making community that was seeded with data from the US Census. To estimate the effects of information seeding, I rely on a natural experiment in which an oversight caused about 60% of quasi-randomly chosen US counties to be seeded with a complete Census map, while the rest were seeded with less complete versions. While access to knowledge generally encourages follow-on knowledge production, I find that a higher level of information seeding significantly lowered follow-on knowledge production and contributor activity on OpenStreetMap and was also associated with lower levels of long-term quality. I argue that information seeding can crowd out contributors’ ability to develop ownership over baseline knowledge and disincentivize follow-on contributions in some circumstances. Empirical evidence supports this explanation as the mechanism through which a higher level of information seeding can stifle rather than spur knowledge production in online communities. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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