Studying the role of diversity in open collaboration network: Experiments on wikipedia

Abstract

This paper presents some empirical study towards understanding the role of diversity of individual authors and whole teams of authors on the quality of the articles they co-edit in open collaboration environments like Wikipedia. We introduce a concept of diversity of interests or versatility of a Wikipedia editor and Wikipedia teams and examine how it is correlated with the quality of their production. Our experiments indicate that editor’s and team’s diversity seems to have bigger impact on quality of their work than other properties.