The largest and most studied peer-produced knowledge commons—projects like Wikipedia, free/libre open source software projects like GNU/Linux, and so on—are now decades old. As knowledge commons have grown and matured, they face a shifting range of new governance challenges related to protecting the valuable information goods they have created, such as increasing audience size and diversity, data use by and contributions from AI, coordinated cybersecurity attacks and misinformation campaigns, increased newcomer rejection, and dwindling engagement in governance activity, to name just a few. This panel aims to bring together researchers seeking to document these shifting challenges and how peer-production communities respond to them, while taking stock of the effectiveness of these responses. In particular, we hope to showcase research that takes advantage of the unique features of knowledge commons (such as the availability of detailed longitudinal data, or comparative data across populations of knowledge commons) to analyze these governance challenges across time, and between communities. The panel would be excited to present research revisiting empirical settings that served as sites of earlier work on knowledge commons to describe what has changed.
English Wikipedia is a significant example of a knowledge commons that is largely maintained by volunteer editors across the world. As in any large collaboration, disputes inevitably arise among Wikipedia’s editors, and the Wikipedia community has a number of processes in place to adjudicate disagreements about what information should be present on Wikipedia, and to address anti-social or harmful conduct that arises within its user base.
The most challenging disputes on Wikipedia are adjudicated by a group of elected volunteers known as the Arbitration Committee (ArbCom). ArbCom investigates evidence around major disputes, and convenes hearings for the users involved on public pages on Wikipedia. Members of the Wikipedia editing community at large may comment on and provide context for disputes as they are being heard by ArbCom.
To understand the role and function of this dispute resolution process over the course of Wikipedia's existence, we assembled a dataset of 203 arbitration cases from 2008 to 2024 to understand who contributes to case discussions, and how a Wikipedian’s stature within the editing community impacts their case’s outcome. Our analysis shows that editors contributing to ArbCom case discussions are rarely commenting for the first time, and have been contributing to Wikipedia much longer than the average editor. Additionally, we find users with higher community stature are more likely to be given warnings than their less experienced counterparts, who tend to receive more bans.
"After increasing rapidly over seven years, the number of active contributors to English Wikipedia peaked in 2007 and has been in decline since. Of course, Wikipedia is only one example of ""peer production""—a model of collaborative production that also lies behind millions of wikis, free/open source software projects, websites like OpenStreetMap, and more. Unfortunately, there is evidence that English Wikipedia's pattern of growth and decline occurs in these other efforts as well. A body of emerging scholarship suggests that decline in projects' contributor bases tends to coincide with a shift from the lightweight governance and porous boundaries closely associated with peer production to less open forms of organization.
Why would successful peer production communities become less open in ways that cause a decline in their contributor bases? Drawing from research into collective action and public goods as well as Ostrom's work on common-pool resources, I will present a theoretical model that suggests an answer. I will argue that peer production projects' success at building valuable knowledge commons drives both a virtuous cycle of good contributions as well as well an influx of bad-faith actors in a dynamic set of relationships that leads communities to become increasingly closed in order to protect the knowledge bases they have built. I will end by presenting a range of empirical evidence in support of the model and by discussing some of its implications.
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Documentation, such as README and CONTRIBUTING files, can serve as the first point of contact for potential contributors to free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) projects. Prominent open source software organizations such as Mozilla, GitHub, and the Linux Foundation advocate that projects provide community-focused and process-oriented documentation early on in order to foster contributor recruitment, expand the project's commons, and drive peer-production activity. In this paper, we investigate the introduction of README files and contributing guidelines in FLOSS projects, as well as whether early documentation conforms to these recommendations or explains subsequent activity in communities. We use a novel dataset of FLOSS projects packaged by the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and conduct a quantitative analysis to examine README (n=2280) and CONTRIBUTING (n=452) files when they are first published into projects' repositories. To analyze changes in project activity, we use random effects coefficients generated by longitudinal multilevel models fit to weekly project contribution data. We find that projects often publish READMEs ritualistically at the beginning of development yet introduce CONTRIBUTING files later in project lifecycles, following an influx of contributions. The initial versions of these files rarely focus on community development, and instead describe organizational processes and offer technical summaries. Our findings suggest that FLOSS projects do not create documentation with community-building in mind, but rather brevity, usage, technical features and processes. Our results raise broader questions of the disconnect between prevailing wisdom in FLOSS commons governance and in-the-wild project management.
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