Predicting member productivity and withdrawal from pre-joining attachments in online production groups

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Productive and dedicated members are critical to the success of online production communities like Wikipedia. Many communities organize in subgroups where members voluntarily work on projects of shared interest. In this paper, we investigate how members' pre-joining connections with the subgroup predict their productivity and withdrawal after joining. Drawing insights from attachment theories in social psychology, we examine two types of prejoining connections: identity-based attachment (how much members' interests were aligned with the subgroup's topics) and bondsbased attachment (how much members had interacted with other members of the subgroup). Analyses of 79,704 editors in 1,341 WikiProjects show that 1) both identity-based and bonds-based attachment increased editors' post-joining productivity and reduced their likelihood of withdrawal; 2) identity-based attachment had a stronger effect on boosting direct contributions to articles while bonds-based attachment had a stronger effect on increasing article and project coordination, and reducing member withdrawal.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1775-1784
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450343350
DOIs
StatePublished - Feb 25 2017
Event2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017 - Portland, United States
Duration: Feb 25 2017Mar 1 2017

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Other

Other2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPortland
Period2/25/173/1/17

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 ACM.

Keywords

  • Bonds-based attachment
  • Identity-based attachment
  • Online communities
  • Online groups
  • Peer production
  • Pre-joining attachment
  • Productivity
  • WikiProject
  • Wikipedia
  • Withdrawal

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