User generated (web) content: Trash or treasure

Abstract

It has been claimed that the advent of user-generated content has reshaped the way people approached all sorts of content realization projects, being multimedia (YouTube, DeviantArt, etc.), knowledge (Wikipedia, blogs), to software in general, when based on a more general Open Source model. After many years of research and evidence, several studies have demonstrated that Open Source Software (OSS) portals often contain a large amount of software projects that simply do not evolve, often developed by relatively small communities, and that still struggle to attract a sustained number of contributors. In terms of such content, the "tragedy" appears to be that the user demand for content and the offer of experts contributing content are on curves with different slopes, with the demand growing more quickly. In this paper we argue that, even given the differences in the requested expertise, many projects reliant on user-contributed content and expertise undergo a similar evolution, along a logistic growth: a first slow growth rate is followed by a much faster evolution growth. When a project fails to attract more developers i.e. contributors, the evolution of project's content does not present the "explosive growth" phase, and it will eventually "burnout", and the project appears to be abandoned. Far from being a negative finding, even abandoned project's content provides a valuable resource that could be reused in the future within other projects. © 2011 ACM.