In the Beginning: The Early Lives of Users in Online Communities
From Anita Borg Institute Wiki
Abstract
The most crucial part of a user's life is the time between when they first view a system and twenty-four hours after their first participation in that system. From that point on, odds are that their participation will decline. When designing online communities, we need to understand this more deeply. My research also proposed a mixed methods study of early life user behavior in Cyclopath, a geowiki for bicyclists.
Blog Links
- Terri Oda: http://terriko.dreamwidth.org/39227.html (contains all three presentations from the PhD Forum 3 session)
- Valerie Fenwick: http://bubbva.blogspot.com/2010/09/ghc10-phd-forum-3-uieducation-another.html (contains all 3 presentations)
Session Notes
Presenter: Katherine Pancieria, University of Minnesota
How she found her thesis project Started with the Wikipedia space with a paper called Becoming Wikipedian. 3 points from the paper stood out. Wikipedians...
- fill different niches
- branch out to new areas as they mature
- take on more "community work" as they mature
Did a qualitative study with nine participants self-reporting. Looking at the divide between high-edit and low-edit wikipedians and seeing if those differences are visible.
- wikipedia power users exist
- edits have increased
- small users make majority of changes
Study looked at registered editors with over 250 edits. Expected trend is that Wikipedians activity would increase and non-Wikipedians would taper off.
Result was that both groups taper off although Wikipedians start off with much heavier activity - this is noticeable on the first day.
Studied the Cyclopath wiki - this is site where bicyclists can find bike routes in Minneapolis
- 2,000 registered users
- 12,000 edits
- 22 cyclopaths (top editors)
- saw same result of heavy first-day editing and both groups taper off, concluding that cyclopaths act similar to wikipedians
why? Surveyed 405 users to find out how different users use the system
what to do with all the data Intervene - discover if encouraging newcomers to do work leads to increased contributions and will alter their lifecycle on system
Contributions
- first days important
- power editors visible
- gaining qualitave understanding of users
- learning can alter pattern
Notes taken by Keita Del Valle, GHC 2010 Live Notetaker.
