Effects of Stigmergic and Explicit Coordination on Wikipedia Article Quality

Abstract

Prior research on Wikipedia has noted the importance of both explicit coordination of edits (i.e., through the article Talk page) and stigmergic coordination (i.e., through the article itself). Using a panel data set of article quality and edits for 23 articles over time, we examine the impact of different kinds of edits on article quality. We find that stigmergically-coordinated edits seem to have the biggest effect on quality, but that explicit coordination of major edits also predicts article quality. The findings have implications for both research on coordination in Wikipedia and for supporting editors