Page:Community Vital Signs Research Paper - Miquel Laniado Consonni.pdf/5

Sustainability 2022, 14, 4705 towards thinking that, excepting the case of a political ban of the site or censorship, the main reasons that can explain community stagnation or decline are not external but due to internal dynamics.

Following this argumentation, several researchers [5,7] investigated the relationship between the bureaucratic and technical structure of Wikipedia and the decrease in the number of new editors. They found that the policies and algorithmic tools that serve as quality control mechanisms often reject the contributions of newcomers, with a lower retention rate being an indirect effect. Gorbatai [18] found that novice contributors might have a negative direct impact on quality, but their participation also motivates experts to contribute and increase the quality of the good, thus mediating the relationship between them and the final outcome.

Hill and Shaw [16] explored the trade-off between quality and openness on other collaborative and peer production projects by studying 740 wikis hosted by Fandom/Wikia over the first five years of each wiki’s history. They observed similar lifecycle dynamics to the English Wikipedia and the decline of its contributor base. They concluded that peer production projects’ decline is mainly a function of existing members turning away newcomers through an evolution of the ecosystem, which becomes more closed to collaboration.

Bureaucratic closure provides a way to safeguard the goods that communities have built. While Wikipedia advocates for openness and flexibility, the necessary bureaucracy to maintain it is multi-faceted in policies, roles, and decision-making processes usually based on the consensus of those editors who follow the dedicated spaces within the wiki [19]. Shaw and Hill [20] studied 683 other wikis and concluded that peer production projects do not function like “laboratories of democracy” but tend to the “iron law of oligarchy”, which states that organizations become large and complex, and a small group of early members consolidate and exercise a monopoly of power within the organization. On the contrary, Konieczny [21] studied the decision-making processes of Wikipedia and concluded that many factors are preventing or slowing the development of an oligarchy on Wikipedia. Rijshouwer et al. [22] saw that while power concentration and bureaucratization are apparent outcomes, various cases show that general community members appear to be concerned about it and contest it. Whether power is concentrated in a few hands or more distributed, the current content quality management and bureaucratization have an adverse effect on welcoming newcomers, engaging younger generations in the project, and including peripheral editors. Assuming this trade-off, we observe a lack of a conscious and explicit assessment of the balance between the two goals in the community decision-making processes.

2.1.2. Barriers to Entry

The growth in the number of policies, guidelines, and documentation has been reported by several studies [6,19,23]. This increased complexity is considered a cost with a negative impact on production [14], but other factors related to the required technical skills or the lack of usability also matter. Literacy in technical design is a long-studied issue since some reports consider that the usability of the MediaWiki technology has significant room for improvement.

For instance, in the field of education, Raitman et al. [24] used a wiki and concluded that it had a poor interface and was cluttered. In higher education, Ebner et al. [25] experimented with the use of wikis to engage students. Even though many pedagogical factors influenced the students’ performance, the study concluded that a wiki was not a proper tool for assignments. Among the answers, bad usability appears as one of the barriers and therefore a potential reason for students’ low level of editing.

In 2012, a MediaWiki extension named VisualEditor (MediaWiki contributors, ’Extension:VisualEditor’, MediaWiki, 7 February 2022, 12:23 UTC, https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Extension:VisualEditor&oldid=5058123 [accessed 19 February 2022]) was released to provide a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editor, which allows editing the same way as writing in a word processor, visualizing the results