The effects of group composition on decision quality in a social production community

Shyong K. Lam, Jawed Karim, John Riedl
2010 Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work - GROUP '10  
Online social production communities allow efficient construction of valuable and high-quality information sources. To be successful, community members must be effective at collaboration, including making collective decisions in the presence of disagreement. We examined over 100,000 decisions made by small working groups in Wikipedia, and analyzed how decision quality in these online groups is influenced by four group composition factors: the size of the group, how members were invited to the
more » ... oup, the prior experience of group members, and apparent bias shown by the group administrator. Our findings lead us to recommendations for designers of social production communities. arise, and the community must make decisions about how to resolve conflict and move forward. Effective decision-making and conflict resolution processes are essential to a healthy community. Flawed processes may lead to poor decisions, which are costly to addressnot only can they increase coordination costs and process losses, they can also alienate users and cause them to leave.
doi:10.1145/1880071.1880083 dblp:conf/group/LamKR10 fatcat:dgaurvuu7bd3nijexjh65vwhtm