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Effects of peer feedback on contribution: a field experiment in Wikipedia

Published: 27 April 2013 Publication History

Abstract

One of the most significant challenges for many online communities is increasing members' contributions over time. Prior studies on peer feedback in online communities have suggested its impact on contribution, but have been limited by their correlational nature. In this paper, we conducted a field experiment on Wikipedia to test the effects of different feedback types (positive feedback, negative feedback, directive feedback, and social feedback) on members' contribution. Our results characterize the effects of different feedback types, and suggest trade-offs in the effects of feedback between the focal task and general motivation, as well as differences in how newcomers and experienced editors respond to peer feedback. This research provides insights into the mechanisms underlying peer feedback in online communities and practical guidance to design more effective peer feedback systems.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '13: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2013
      3550 pages
      ISBN:9781450318990
      DOI:10.1145/2470654
      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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      Published: 27 April 2013

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      Author Tags

      1. field experiment
      2. online communities
      3. peer feedback
      4. wikipedia.

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      • (2024)Exploring Activity-Sharing Response Differences Between Broad-Purpose and Dedicated Online Social PlatformsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36868988:CSCW2(1-37)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
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