Peer effects , user-generated content , Wikipedia , network of editors , direct and indirect peers
Abstract:
On Wikipedia, the largest online encyclopedia, editors who contribute to the same articles
and exchange comments on articles’ talk pages work in collaborative manner engaging
in communication about their work. Thus they can be considered as peers who are likely to
influence each other. In this article, I examine whether the activity of these peers, measured
by the average amount of peer contributions or by the number of peers, yields spillovers to
the amount of contributions by individuals. The partially overlapping group structure allows
to identify peer effects and to use the number of the indirect peers as an instrument for the
activity and the number of direct peers. The results show that, while controlling for observable
editor and peer characteristics, an increase in the monthly average peer contribution by
1 per cent increases the amount of individual monthly contributions to Wikipedia (among
individuals that contribute to Wikipedia every month) by up to 0.4 per cent. Similarly,
spillovers coming from the number of peers yield a positive effect of 0.17 per cent per article
to 0.05 per cent for overall monthly contributions to Wikipedia.
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