Is Interaction More Important than Individual Performance?: A Study of Motifs in Wikia

Recent research has discovered the importance of informal roles in peer online collaboration. These roles reflect prototypical activity patterns of contributors such as different editing activities in writing communities. While previous work has analyzed the dynamics of contributors within single communities, so far, the relationship between individuals’ roles and interaction among contributors remains unclear. This is a severe drawback given that collaboration is one of the driving forces in online communities. In this study, we use a network-based approach to combine information about individuals’ roles and their interaction over time. We measure the impact of recurring subgraphs in co-author networks, so called motifs, on the overall quality of the resulting collaborative product. Doing so allows us to measure the effect of collaboration over mere isolated contributions by individuals. Our findings indicate that indeed there are consistent positive implications of certain patterns that cannot be detected when looking at contributions in isolation, e.g. we found shared positive effects of contributors that specialize on content quality over of quantity. The empirical results presented in this work are based on a study of several online writing communities, namely wikis from Wikia and Wikipedia.